In the Lake of the Woods Chapters 8 & 9 Summary & Analysis

Chapters 8 & 9

Summary: Chapter 8, How the Night Passed

The last night at the cabin, John wakes up in a sweat. He leaves the bed where Kathy is sleeping, provocatively yelling, “Kill Jesus.” John puts a teakettle on the stove to boil water and imagines himself fighting Jesus. While lying on the floor, John recalls the election results coming in and his learning of his landslide loss. He believes his campaign was sunk by secrets, which the narrator doesn’t name, that were made public. Now John has no hope of any future political career, which isn’t fair because he worked hard in the state legislature and as lieutenant governor.

Once the water is boiling, John carries the teakettle into the living room while yelling, “Kill Jesus.” He pours boiling water on the houseplants, causing them to wilt and die. He boils more water and then moves toward the bedroom. For an unspecified amount of time, John leaves his conscious self and returns to find himself kneeling by the bed, watching Kathy sleep. In later days, he thinks he should have waked her to share the shame he feels at his defeat and the ghosts he carries from Vietnam. Instead, he touches her shoulder and hears a low, buzzing sound. John loses time again. He is lost inside his head with images flashing at him. After he returns to the living room, he forgets what he does next. Later, he finds himself standing in the lake, then submerged in the lake, then sitting on the dock, and then waking up in bed alone.

Summary: Chapter 9, Hypothesis

This chapter presents an alternate hypothesis for Kathy’s disappearance. John’s yelling would have woken Kathy up. After watching him empty boiling water on the plants and hearing him say, “Kill Jesus,” she goes outside. Trying to understand, she spies on him inside the house, watching him refilling the teakettle. John moves oddly, like a sleepwalker. He talks to himself and claws at his face and laughs. Kathy knows she should wake John up, but she also sees how unhinged he is. She considers walking down the road for help but decides to wait and see how he is tomorrow. Kathy mostly feels pity for John. Everything he has worked for is gone. She knows how much he needs love.

Kathy thinks of the election after the story broke. The crowds thinned, but at one stop, a woman yelled, “Not true!” That night, Kathy asked John if what they were saying about him was true. He gave an evasive answer, “Everything’s true. Everything’s not true,” and then brought up Kathy’s “skeletons” by mentioning her dentist. John gave his concession speech shortly after that with Kathy at his side.

Inside the cottage, the teakettle whistles. Kathy watches John walk toward the bedroom. She goes inside herself and sees the dead plants. Maybe, right then, she walked off into the night. Or maybe she went to the bedroom and saw John as he raised the teakettle over the bed. In that case, she would have left quickly and run down the road. Anything could have happened then. Kathy could still be out there.

Analysis: Chapters 8 & 9

Chapter 8 of the book explores the depths of John’s mental state. The chapter portrays incidents and actions that no person in their right frame of mind would do. He talks and laughs to himself. He becomes disassociated from his body and his conscious mind. He loses time. His memory becomes fragmented. He hears a savage buzzing noise. He kills a houseful of potted plants. While the text does not talk about him doing anything to Kathy, his action of going into the bedroom with a boiling teakettle of water has a truly ominous feel. Combined with Kathy’s disappearance and John’s mysterious activities in the lake that night, readers can’t help but suspect John murdered Kathy. His repetition of the phrase “Kill Jesus!” signifies how desperate he has become. John said the words to challenge Jesus or God or someone else powerful. He obviously chooses these words because he thinks they are among the most offensive he can think of, but when nothing happens, he feels untouchable, as if he can do whatever he likes.

Connections with earlier chapters are starting to emerge. The teakettle, which Ruth references in Chapter 6, seems to be the weapon John wielded. He threw it away, as one would do with an instrument of murder. Chapters 8 and 9 are also strongly linked. The hypothesis presented in Chapter 9 is the flip side of the events narrated in Chapter 8, just from a different point of view. In Chapter 9, Kathy sees the actions described in Chapter 8. Whereas John imagines fighting with Jesus, Kathy sees him acting out this fight on his own body, clawing at and gouging his face. An interesting role reversal also is seen in Chapter 9. Once Kathy has left the house that night, she spies on John, but he was always the one who spied on her. However, she undertakes this action to try to understand him so she can help him, far different from John’s spying on her to try to catch her in an act of betrayal. However, when Kathy sees John crouching next to the bed and hears the hiss as he pours out boiling water, she comes to understand that John was taking steps that would end in her death if she had still been lying in the bed. Right then she knew that she had no way of helping John and she never would. That’s when she decides to leave the marriage.

These chapters also provide more information about the scandal that ended John’s political career. Whereas in earlier chapters, readers were not given enough information to draw any conclusions, this chapter makes clear that accusations have been made about John, accusations that he doesn’t even deny to his wife. When Kathy directly asks him about these accusations, he gives an answer that provides no answer, simply saying that everything is true and that everything is false. Such deflection shows not only John’s interest in avoiding Kathy’s question but also his inability to understand why it matters to her in the first place. Even if he did something that he can’t admit to, John fails to say so and instead attempts to deny the validity of the question. Readers are likely to infer that something happened in Vietnam that John has held secret. Other details are hinted at, such as Kathy’s affair with her dentist, as well as unknown details, like the hoe and PFC Weatherby, who readers know from Chapter 7 served in the war with John. By this point, readers understand that even if they don’t fully understand the import of these details, they will in time.

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