The Door in the Wall Summary

“The Door in the Wall” is narrated by a man named Redmond who considers the fantastical story of the door in the wall, told him by his ordinarily reserved friend Lionel Wallace. One evening at dinner, Wallace confesses the reason for his long-standing distraction from work and relationships. Redmond is unsure of whether the story itself is true, but he is convinced that Wallace believes it.

When Wallace was five years old, he came across a green door set in a white wall that seemed to call to him while walking the streets of London. He knew that the door would be unlocked but hesitated to enter because he felt his strict father would be angry with him if he did. In a burst of emotion, he rushed through the door and found an otherworldly garden that filled him with immediate peace and happiness.

The garden is difficult for Wallace to describe, and he admits that he may have altered some of its details in his mind over the years, but he emphasizes the feelings it gave him: exhilaration, lightness, goodness, and well-being. In the garden, he met two tame panthers and a beautiful girl who led him by the hand to other children who played games with him. Eventually, a somber woman took him into a room and showed him a book that contained the story of his past. When it reached the page with Wallace standing outside the green door, however, and Wallace urged the woman to go on, he found himself once again on the London sidewalk where he had been before going through the door. Wallace felt deeply sad at being ejected from the garden. He also attempted to tell his father what he saw, but his father punished him for lying and forbid him from speaking of the garden.

Years later, on his way to school, Wallace accidentally encountered the door again. He felt the same draw to go through it, but passed it by in order to get to school on time. He made the mistake of telling another boy about the door but was unable to find it when pressured into leading his schoolmates there, and was mocked mercilessly by the other schoolboys. He saw the door again on his way to receive a scholarship from Oxford, and, again, chose to pass it by. For years, the door appeared to him only while he was on his way to important meetings, and he never went in.

Now middle-aged and a successful politician, Wallace is nonetheless dissatisfied with his life. He swore to himself that if he saw the door again, he would go through. However, it has appeared to him three times in the past year—during an important vote, on his way to his father’s deathbed, and in the middle of a promotion—and he has passed it by every time. Depressed and regretful, Wallace tells Redmond that he has missed his chance to return through the door. He wanders the streets at night searching for the door.

Redmond reveals that three months after that conversation, Wallace was killed by a fall into a pit in a railway construction site. The pit was just inside a door in a makeshift fence surrounding the pit, which had been left unlocked by mistake. Redmond considers how, in the electric lights, the door must have looked like Wallace’s green door. It seems to Redmond that, regardless of whether the green door was ever real or just some kind of hallucination, some might think the door betrayed Wallace in the end. But Redmond wonders, whether Wallace—a dreamer and a man of vision—would have seen it that way.