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 21-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 21 Summary
There is no text from Zampanò in this chapter, which is comprised of a series of dated journal entries from Johnny in the main text. They range from May to November 1998, and are out of chronological order, as Johnny moves back and forth in time.
In May, Johnny embarks on his journey to find the house on Ash Tree Lane and travels to many locations in Virginia, such as Jamestown Colony, Colonial Williamsburg, William and Mary College, Richmond, Charlottesville, and Monticello.
However, he realizes he is really on a journey to find his mother, and he visits “The Whale,” the psychiatric institution where she resided. Though it is now closed, Johnny breaks in and sits in her former room. He also visits the location of his former house, which is now a lumber yard.
By the end of August, Johnny is in Flagstaff, Arizona. He wanders into a bar and listens to live music. The band plays a song called “Five and a Half Minute Hallway” and later explains it’s inspired by a book called House of Leaves, with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant. Johnny reads through the book, seeing his own work and the band’s notes in the margins.
Johnny describes his experience from September 2 to September 28, saying he spends time with old friends who are doctors in Seattle, one of them Dr. Nowell. There, he exercises, eats well, starts taking “a recently discovered drug,” and feels much better (507). He then confesses that he has made all of this up.
In October, Johnny is back in LA, staying at a hotel. He learns that Lude has recently died. Upon leaving the hospital after he fight with Gdansk Man, Lude abuses drugs more than ever before and dies in a motorcycle crash while under the influence.
Johnny leaves the hotel and starts sleeping under benches. Gdansk Man finds Johnny and beats him up while Kyrie watches from the car. Johnny grabs a bottle of Jack Daniels and hits GdanskMan, afterwards using his fists to kill him. Kyrie rushes over, and Johnny expresses his intention to close “off her life, even as I rape her” (497).
Later, Johnny reports that he is unsure what is a nightmare and what is real, and eventually reaches the conclusion that he lets both people go in the fight without even touching Kyrie.
Johnny relates a story from Dr. Nowell (the doctor he supposedly has made up).“A baby is born with holes in his brain,” and the doctors tell the mother the baby will not survive without being hooked up to machinery (519). The mother stays up for three days, singing to the baby without sleeping or eating, and many believe the child will live. On the fourth day, they disconnect the tubes and “the child is gone” (521).
Johnny pawns his weapons and gets ready to leave the city.
Chapter 22 Summary
Chapter 22 picks up midsentence, and where Chapter 20 leaves off. Karen is in the children’s bedroom, watching the very end of Will’s tape. A darkness has opened up in the room, and Karen steps into it with a flashlight. The wall seals up behind her. She finds Will, alive and naked, and cradles him in the hallway. The house “just dissolve[s],” and Karen is now on the front lawn with Will (523). He is rushed to the hospital, and Karen stays by his bedside for days. Will survives, but frostbite injuries claim his right hand, the top of an ear, his left eye, and patches of skin.
Chapter 23 Summary
Will and Karen get married, and the family moves to Vermont. Karen contracts breast cancer and undergoes chemotherapy. Will finishes the film with shots of the new family home, as well as an empty road after a Halloween parade.
Chapters 21-23 Analysis
These chapters focus on the beast/monster motif and its possible meanings and permutations. The novel has hinted at Johnny’s beast-like qualities, and his journal entries hammer this point home. He gets into the fight with the Gdansk Man, with “teeth grinding back and forth like some beast” (496). He also connects to a rage that is never been fully apparent prior, saying “Here then at long last is my darkness” (497). In what seems to be a fantasy, he kills Gdansk Man and rapes and kills Kyrie—he has never turned violent towards a woman before. This represents Johnny’s low point, his most violent, elemental self. However, his journal makes it seem like this was just a fantasy, and he does not do lasting damage to Gdansk Man, nor does he touch Kyrie.
Earlier, when analyzing his memory of being burned, he notes his father’s growl, thereby connecting him to the beast. However, in a new and supposedly clearer memory, Johnny reports there is no growl from his father, only a wail from his mother. The growl of the beast turns into the cry of the mother, and the beast becomes something else. It is no longer just a violent, destructive, inhuman creature, it is a mother in pain—albeit a mother who is perhaps capable of violence. The beast is no longer only darkness but now is a creature of both darkness and illumination.
Instability continues to figure into these pages. Notably, the text calls itself into question on an essential level. Before embarking on his journey, Johnny tells us he has put the manuscript into a storage unit and is now only writing in his journal. However, when he talks to the band in Arkansas, they report they have found the very same book on the internet, and they also have a physical copy of it. This begs the question—how did this work get released and distributed? The reader cannot trust Johnny’s assertion that the manuscript is in a storage locker, so the question goes unanswered. Moreover, the book is not even totally “written” yet. We are reading a book containing journal entries that are supposedly part of the book House of Leaves. In this way, the novel plays with its own existence and sets up paradoxes around itself.
