43 pages • 1 hour read
V. E. SchwabGallant
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Interlude 5-Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Beyond the Wall”
Interlude 5 Summary
The master of the house is intimately aware of all of the bones that comprise his body. There’s one bone that’s missing, though, and he wants to get it back.
Part 4, Chapter 16 Summary
Olivia tries to decipher her father’s drawings as her mother’s ghoul looks on. The ghouls point out of the window, toward the garden wall, and Olivia decides to go out and investigate, taking the journal with her. At the door in the wall, she finds a narrow opening between the stones. The journal fits inside it perfectly, and Olivia realizes that her parents used to pass the book back and forth at this spot to communicate. The journal falls through to the far side of the wall. Olivia climbs the wall and goes to the other side to retrieve the journal. The wind picks up, scattering pages of the journal that had been ripped out years ago by a cruel girl at Merilance. Olivia collects the pages and when she looks up again, she finds that Gallant is no longer visible. She stands in a world of dead plants and rotting gardens, and she sees now a second Gallant at the head of the garden.
Part 4, Chapter 17 Summary
Olivia finds herself in a mirror-version of the Gallant estate where the ground is littered with bones, and everything that was once living is now dead. She makes her way to the uncanny second Gallant, remembering that Grace described finding her father indoors. She moves carefully, trying not to make any noise, and is distressed to hear movement coming from a hall. She peers through the open doors to see dancers twirling about. They are watched by an inhuman presence: “a man, and not a man” (208) sitting in a high-backed chair, his eyes milky white.
Part 4, Chapter 18 Summary
The master of the house moves among the dancers, and they fall to the ground as he passes. He summons their bones to him, and the bones integrate into his body. Olivia exhales, shocked at this, and one of the three shadows at the master’s side hears her. Olivia, praying that someone or something will help her, runs, pursued by the shadow. She barricades herself into a room at the end of the hall. Just as the shadow is breaking through the door, a ghoul emerges from a small door in the wall, grabs her, and drags her through the doorway.
Part 4, Chapter 19 Summary
Olivia, disturbed by the fact that a ghoul can physically touch her in this place, confronts the ghoul. The ghoul signs to her that it heard her prayer for help and is showing her a way out. Olivia asks how the ghoul could possibly have heard her, but the shadow is on her heels so Olivia flees down the corridor, finding a door at the end that leads her to the kitchen and out of Gallant. As she runs through the courtyard outside, Olivia sees a boy—a real, living boy—laid out on the floor of the fountain.
Part 4, Chapter 20 Summary
Olivia finds that the boy is bound to the fountain with ivy tied at his wrists. She tries to free him, but the master’s shadows emerge from the house. Olivia mentally pleads for help and ghouls rise from the ground, using their bodies to shield Olivia from the oncoming shadows. Olivia isn’t able to free the boy before the shadows tear through the ghouls’ bodies, so Olivia runs to the iron gate. When she turns, she sees the master standing on the house’s balcony, beckoning her to return to him. Olivia pushes through the door and finds Matthew on the other side. With a cut-open palm, Matthew seals the door shut with his own blood. Matthew, furious at Olivia, brings her back to the house. Matthew quarrels with Hannah once inside, angry at her for having drugged him into sleeping. Hannah responds that he needed to rest and she wants to help him. Matthew tells Olivia to pack her things and Olivia, unable to express her desire to stay and her desire to be a part of her family’s legacy, goes upstairs to pack.
Part 4, Chapter 21 Summary
As Olivia packs, she reflects on what she saw on the other side of the wall. Her mother had said that the master had four shadows, and she saw only three; she deduces that the fourth shadow must have been her father. She doesn’t understand what this makes her. She grieves the loss of the pages of the green journal on the other side of the wall. While everyone else sleeps, she goes downstairs and copies from memory the passages from the green journal into the red journal. She muses that she will leave Gallant but not return to Merilance.
Interlude 5-Part 4 Analysis
Olivia’s arrival at Gallant’s shadowy doppelganger marks one of the novel’s most prominent uses of doubling. One of the uses of the double in Gothic literature is to create a sense of the uncanny. Schwab leans into the sense of unease created by shadow-Gallant’s uncanniness early in this section of the novel. Olivia describes the second Gallant as “[a] drawing done too much from memory or a contour sketch, where you do not lift the pen, and all the lines connect and bleed together into something abstract, a stylized impression” (200). This description not only helps characterize Olivia as someone who sees the world with a visual artist’s eye, but it also draws attention to the artifice of the shadow-Gallant. Olivia immediately sees, in the structure’s uncanniness, that this is a structure that has been crafted in order to create a certain effect, just as an artist makes choices in crafting a picture to create certain effects. This uncanniness meets Olivia at every corner of the shadow-realm: What she assumes to be seeds are actually teeth, and what she assumes to be only a tooth is transformed into a mouse. Much of the horror that Olivia, and the reader, experiences in the shadow-realm comes from this constant process of defamiliarization that she must endure.
The way in which the master’s shadow-world defamiliarizes Olivia with the world as she thought she knew it is thematically crucial to this section of the novel. Olivia comes away from her experience in the second Gallant no longer certain of what is real. When she sees her mother’s ghoul on the bed, she muses “Perhaps she is real. Real, she is learning, is a slippery thing, not a solid black line but a shape with soft edges, a great deal of gray” (238). Olivia has always assumed that, because she knows her mother is dead, the ghoul of her mother cannot be “real” in the sense that it cannot provide the same maternal comfort, interaction, and wisdom that a living mother would have been able to provide. The experience in the shadow-realm, though, asks Olivia to reconsider the boundaries of what “real” is, and to interrogate the reasons why she considers the memory of a living mother to be more “real” than the presence of a ghoul-mother. This line of questioning sets a pivotal aspect of Olivia’s growth into motion: her arc toward learning to accept the present even given the ruptures of the past. Olivia slowly learns that her ghoul-mother can still offer her knowledge and be a useful presence in her life, and that movement toward acceptance begins here. Her interactions with her ghoul-mother offer a twist on the theme of Finding Connection in Communication, as Olivia challenges her own concept of the value of interacting with her ghoul-mother.
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By V. E. Schwab
