Chaos vs. Order Theme Analysis

In “Like a House on Fire,” a perfectionistic man’s life is thrown into chaos when he sustains a serious back injury at work and is forced to take extensive sick leave. The story’s two central characters—the unnamed narrator and his wife, Claire—embody order and chaos, respectively, and the conflict between the two illustrates how insisting on complete order can actually lead to increased chaos. Some chaos, Kennedy suggests, is inevitable, and denying that fact only makes it truer.

The narrator embodies order throughout, and Kennedy depicts his need for control as overbearing and unhealthy. The story’s narrator and central character is a perfectionist. He owes much of his professional success to his careful precision, but it is also to blame for the back injury that now prevents him from working at all. Describing his work overseeing the maintenance of some trees, he says: “I saw […] an errant bit of cypress bough just at head height, offending my perfectionist streak.” It is while trying to cut down that bit of tree that the narrator is injured.

The narrator now spends his days confined at home in agony, “driven mad” by the “toys and mess [he] can’t pick up.” For the narrator, the domestic setting represents disorder and chaos. Unlike in his job, at home he has little control over any mess that offends his “perfectionist streak,” and his general inability to manage his environment is only intensified by his specific physical disability. Claire resents the fact that her husband’s presence at home brings his “control freakery” into daily family life. Claire demands to know why he has chosen to lie down in the busiest room of the house, saying: “Why there? Just where you can keep your eye on everything, like Central Control?” Arguably, the narrator has chosen to position himself “in the middle of a busy family room” because he wants to continue participating in family life, despite his illness. Claire highlights, however, that when the narrator complains about the household mess “it morphs pretty quickly into orders.” The narrator inadvertently creates more chaos at home—through the tension between him and Claire—when she perceives his need for order as bossy and overbearing.

In contrast to the narrator, Claire’s preference for chaos facilitates her more relaxed approach to life and its challenges. While the narrator represents order and control, his wife Claire has always been “the slapdash one.” The narrator remembers how Claire “was as messy as the kids,” and how she would implore him to be more relaxed with the children, saying: “Don’t inflict your perfectionism on them, for God’s sake. Leave it for your job.” However, Claire is a nurse and has spent the past weeks caring for her husband as if he were one of her patients. The narrator describes how he has witnessed a new “side to her […] for the first time.” Tending to him with a “professional, acquired distance,” Claire touches him with “hands that were anything except neutral and businesslike.” Kennedy demonstrates how Claire is able to strike a balance between order and disorder, an approach that Kennedy suggests is much more healthy than the narrator’s fixation on total order.

The narrator’s refusal to embrace a little chaos ultimately causes him more pain, both physical and emotional. Kennedy demonstrates how the narrator literally impedes his own recovery through his pursuit of order: “I get down on my hands and knees in dogged slow motion, like an old-age pensioner who's dropped something.” Here, the narrator strains his back to retrieve a forgotten shoe from under the couch, desperate to create order around him even when pursuing it makes his injuries worse. In addition, the narrator’s inability to relinquish his need for control causes him more internal misery and stress. “I just can't stand all this...chaos I can't do anything about.” Kennedy implies that his new environment exacerbates the narrator’s need for order, making him feel powerless and helpless when he is unable to exert the control he is accustomed to.

Furthermore, the narrator frequently likens emotional pain to the physical pain he is suffering due to his injury. The narrator worries, for example, about his second son, Sam, maturing too fast. He remembers “with a sudden aching spasm, of the year before, when Claire and I had read his note to Santa.” The narrator’s grief surrounding his son is inherently tied to the lack of control he has over Sam’s growing up. Thus the narrator’s refusal to accept what he cannot control causes him intense emotional pain that mirrors his physical pain. Kennedy even goes so far as to suggest that the narrator’s back pain is so entwined with his emotional suffering that he is unable to recover from his injury at all. After sixteen weeks of unsuccessful rehabilitation, he considers whether his pain might originate “in the mind or the emotions rather than through a physical cause.” Kennedy draws attention to the psychosomatic aspect of the narrator’s illness, not to dismiss the very real pain that he is suffering, but to draw attention to how the narrator’s recovery is thwarted by deep emotional stress, which seems closely linked to his inability to accept chaos in his life.

By outlining the ways in which the narrator’s fixation on order has only led to increased pain for himself and his family (by depicting the more chaotic Claire as a healthier contrast) Kennedy seems to argue that a sustainable worldview has to allow for a certain degree of chaos—especially since denying it will only make its effects more powerful.