In the Lake of the Woods: Chapter 30 Summary & Analysis

The final chapter of evidence seems like a kind of summation of everything we’ve learned. Thus, Bethany can only conclude that Kathy and John had secrets—she has no idea what these secrets were. Similarly, Vincent and Lux present their “theory” and “fact”-driven interpretations of the events. The former is sure that John killed Kathy; the latter thinks that anything could have happened.

The sheer number of missing persons is a reminder of how much mystery goes unexplained every day. For every Kathy, there are literally hundreds of thousands of other, presumably equally complicated cases of disappearance.

This bit of evidence suggests that Kathy never intended to return. Or put another way: this evidence, presented in this way at this time in the book, seems to suggest that Kathy never intended to return. The evidence is never certain, as the narrator himself reveals when he quotes Freud as Freud argues that biographers by their nature can never be reliable, as they must engage in a kind of “magic” to put the pieces of the story together to make a cohesive whole.

We return to the theme of one plus one equaling zero. At times, John has interpreted this notion to mean that deception can “cancel out” evil and immoral behavior, but Lux seems to deny that even as he can never get the evidence to add up to anything concrete. Ruth’s comment about Claude is contrasted by Myrna’s interpretation of him: Claude had faith in John despite all the evidence stacked up against John. Myrna saw John as giving her a disturbing look even as John was trying to act normal and not reveal his anger to her. Both of those different interpretations of John come down to perspective, to whether or not the other character had faith in John.

We see the full irony of John’s predicament—if he hadn’t entered politics—the reason he went to Vietnam in the first place—no evidence of John’s wrongdoing would ever have made itself known. Ironically, it’s John’s own attempts to cover up his guilt that expose his guilt. Thinbill’s letter suggests that the only way to alleviate trauma is to talk about it honestly.

In this version of events, Kathy loves John more than ever after she finds out about his involvement in Thuan Yen. In earlier chapters, it’s been suggested that John’s actions in Vietnam drove a wedge between him and his wife; here, the opposite is suggested.

In a sense, this evidence doesn’t show us anything we didn’t already know: John treated marriage as another magic trick. At the same time, it conveys the full extent of his cluelessness about how to make Kathy love him, and thus makes John seem like a sympathetic character, not a manipulative one.

We’re given another confirmation that Claude and John understood one another—Claude didn’t give John sympathy, but he seemed to understand what John was going through, without condoning or condemning it. The final two quotes here shift the emphasis from John’s neurosis to the narrator’s—he’s clearly obsessed with Kathy’s story, long after the other characters have lost interest.

In the end, Kathy’s disappearance is like a Rorschach inkblot test: optimists take an optimistic view of the situation, and pessimists assume the worst. We’ve faced the possibility that John and Kathy ran off together before, but here, it seems like the most likely hypothesis of all—it’s highly unlikely that two people would go missing in the same week. This would make the entire case a “double consummation”—John made himself disappear long after the police thought the “trick” was over.

All three of these quotations are optimistic to varying degrees. Perhaps the most illuminating is Eleanor’s—people “have to” be hopeful, she argues. In other words, it’s up to the reader how he or she interprets Kathy’s disappearance—in the absence of evidence, one might as well choose the happiest outcome. Thinbill’s prophesy is darker—even if John does disappear, he argues, he’ll never entirely overcome the trauma or guilt from the war.

With only a few more pages to go in the novel, we see what motivates the narrator himself. He, too, went through horror in Vietnam—but where John deals with horror by trying to forget about it, the narrator tries to process and transfigure his horror using storytelling. By telling a story about a similar soldier, the narrator faces and studies his own “flies,” but indirectly, safely, and perhaps without confronting it fully. Perhaps this obsession is, then, a manifestation of the narrator’s own repression of the war.

The narrator ends on an optimistic note—people have the ability to overcome trauma and move on. Yet there’s something a little terrifying about this possibility—what he’s saying is that people have the ability to commit horrible acts of murder and rape, and then live perfectly happy lives afterwards. It’s an ambiguous way for the narrator to explain what motivates him. It’s strange that the narrator characterizes his experience writing the book as a way of remembering Vietnam, since he’s just admitted that he feels distanced from his behavior in the war. One could interpret the narrator’s strategy for dealing with trauma as no different than John’s—he’s shifting the blame to other people, and distancing himself from his actions instead of owning up to what he did. At the same time, the narrator doesn’t deny that he committed atrocities; he simply refuses to accept that he is incapable of changing himself through storytelling and reflection.