52 pages • 1 hour read
Mark Z. DanielewskiHouse Of Leaves
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 17-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary
After receiving the analysis from Dr. O’Greery, Will promises Billy to stop investigating. The two get drunk, and that night Will goes back to the house after leaving a letter for Billy and Karen. When Billy goes to the house, he finds Will’s car outside, but the house is empty and the hallway has disappeared.
Various critics speculate on why Will returns to the house, some claiming his need for possession (The Kellog-Antwerk Claim), others saying he wishes to “be obliterated by it” (The Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria) (396). Zampanò includes Will’s letter to substantiate the latter claim. In it, he apologizes, says he is going to the house, and explains the meaning of “Delial,” a name he often repeats in his sleep. Delial is the name he gave to the starving Sudanese girl in the photo that won him the Pulitzer. A final school of thought, The Haven Slocum Theory, analyzes the “level of discomfort experienced following any exposure to the house” (396). These critics analyze three of Will’s dreams and contend that Will is inspired by them to revisit the house, which is now called Exploration #5. Pages are missing before the third dream is analyzed.
Johnny wakes up “slick with sweat” from a dream in which he is “in the hull of some enormous vessel (403). He wanders through room after room and eventually encounters a “drunken frat boy” (403). The frat boy pursues Johnny, then turns into Kyrie, then Ashley, then Thumper. The figure swings an ax at Johnny and injures his shoulder, aiming for his head, when the dreams cuts out.
Chapter 18 Summary
In April, Karen heads to the house on Ash Tree Lane to look for Will. She visits with the real estate agent, Alicia Rosenbaum. Karen enters the house and discovers none of the previous abnormalities—the hallway is now a closet. Karen decides to move back into the house; Reston visits to help her investigate. She writes in her journal and films with the Hi8 camera. Karen begins to hear Will’s voice, and, one night in May, finds his clothes, pack, and film. As she plays the film in the bedroom, the wall in the children’s room vanishes and there is “horror looming up behind her” (417). The scene ends mid-sentence.
Zampanò delves into the story of the Jamestown Colony in Virginia, which was established and eventually failed in the early 1600s. Three men leave the failing Jamestown colony to search for game, and Zampanò includes their entries in a journal that later surfaces in Boston. The entries “concern the quest for game, the severe weather and the inevitable understanding that cold and hunger were fast colluding in the singular sensation of death” (410). The last entry describes finding stairs; Zampanò says these entries “may offer some proof that Navidson’s extraordinary property existed almost four hundred years ago” (414).
Johnny sells his mother’s locket and resolves to go to Virginia to see the house on Ash Tree Lane. He stops by the tattoo shop and leaves an envelope for Thumper. He learns Lude is in the hospital after getting into a fight and goes to visit him. Johnny resolves to put the trunk and manuscript into a storage unit as soon as he finishes writing what he is at this moment in the novel.
Chapter 19 Summary
Zampanò suggests Will goes back to the house in order to get a “better picture,” since he feels the quality of what he has captured is poor (418). Zampanò analyzes the Delial photography, noting Will “shot her once and only in one way” (420). He attributes part of the picture’s strength to its composition. He includes a “diagram” of the photo, which is a blank space between brackets (421).
Chapter 20 Summary
This chapter details Exploration #5, which is captured on the film Karen discovers in the house. Will packs a variety of film, equipment, and rations, which he loads into a trailer attached to a mountain bike. He pedals through the hallway and eventually goes downhill, logging 163 miles on the first day. He tries to return and notes, “It’s as if I’m moving along a surface that always tilts downward no matter which direction I face” (425). He keeps riding for about two weeks, and then stops at the edge of an “abyss” (437). He sees a staircase lying on its side. When he wakes, the staircase is vertical and he climbs it, his bike and supplies dropping out from under him. He arrives in a small chamber and climbs another ladder to arrive at yet another room. He is back in the hallway and moves into a larger room, “where everything about the house changes” (459-60). He climbs through what seems to be a window, which promptly vanishes behind him.
All of his flashlights and flares die, so he resorts to matches. He starts to read the House of Leaves, using his matches as illumination, then burning the actual book, in order to use it as a light source, until the book is entirely burnt.
The bottom drops from under him, and he says “I’m floating or falling or I don’t know what” (468).Will falls or floats to his death in total darkness until the very last frames, which show “a tiny fleck of blue crying light into the void” (489).
Chapters 17-20 Analysis
These chapters further delve into the themes of narrative instability and deterioration. Will himself deteriorates when he returns to Virginia, with Zampanò noting, “The house had taken hold of him” (384). Will, as the creator of his own film, is failing, and thus cannot fully be trusted. Johnny also continues to deteriorate mentally and physically, and the reader must continue to question his ability to accurately convey what is happening. Johnny is finally evicted and thus no longer has even his apartment as a base of stability. Both characters are increasingly placeless.
The text becomes very unstable in these chapters, with Chapter 19 beginning with the textual representation of braille, with the last line translated as “Behold the perfect pantheon of absence” (423). Absence, here, functions as another form of illegibility through the absence of letters. Text cascades across the page, moving up, down, and diagonally. The movement of the words sometimes mimic their action; for example, as the text reads “rising higher and higher and higher until,” each word rises higher and higher across the page (429). One page even contains musical bars. In this way, as Will moves towards death, the text becomes less and less legible.
These chapters also continue the pattern of mirroring and the use of the uncanny. Johnny’s dream of wandering through a labyrinthine hall mirrors the movement through the hallway in The Navidson Record. In the story of the men who escape Jamestown, their entries echo the men’s experience in the hallway of the house—disorienting, disturbing, and seemingly interminable. In their last entry, they note, “Ftaires! We haue found ftaires! [sic]” (414). Just like the men in the hallway, they encounter a set of stairs. After Johnny reads the Jamestown reports and sees “f” substituted for “s,” he begins to absorb this habit into his own writing of the footnotes. Thus, his experience mirrors the text. Will reads House of Leaves, which is the title of the novel itself. Here, the novel mirrors itself within its own interior. In all of these instances of repetition and difference, the novel creates instances of the uncanny—things that are familiar yet slightly off.
