In The Lake of the Woods is a story that is written by the narrator who has very few facts to base his story off of. The narrator knows that a politician and his wife went for a weekend in a cabin, and then she went missing. Many main witnesses were unobtainable, and the available evidence for the narrator is negligible. Throughout the story, the narrator presents everything he knows to the reader, along with his own predictions, all of which seem just as likely as the others. Every way he adds up the evidence leads to a different scenario, and it is impossible to tell which is the most likely. The further on in the narrative the reader gets, the less evidence there is that is presented, yet the more hypotheses appear. From a limited number
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In the beginning of the novel, the narrator presents many relevant pieces of evidence, including key witness testimonies and pictures from the cabin where Kathy goes missing. For example, evidence listed includes the “Remains of six to eight plants... Plant material largely decomposed” and also an “Iron Teakettle. Weight 2.3 Pounds.Capacity, 3 quarts” (O’Brien 8-10). These images are used throughout the novel to construct many different images, some of him boiling the house plants with the tea kettle, some of him boiling his own wife. However, as the novel continues, the evidence that he presents becomes increasingly more obscure and in addition to this, he begins to interrupt the actual evidence with his own thoughts. The first time he does this he states, “Yes, and I’m a theory man too. Biographer, historian and medium- call me what you want- but even after four years of hard labor I’m left with little more than supposition and possibility” (30). He continues on to state, “I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evidence” (30). Through these statements the narrator is directly stating that although he has evidence, he lacks the truth, and in essence all he can truly do is recreate events to the best of his
In the beginning of the novel, the narrator presents many relevant pieces of evidence, including key witness testimonies and pictures from the cabin where Kathy goes missing. For example, evidence listed includes the “Remains of six to eight plants... Plant material largely decomposed” and also an “Iron Teakettle. Weight 2.3 Pounds.Capacity, 3 quarts” (O’Brien 8-10). These images are used throughout the novel to construct many different images, some of him boiling the house plants with the tea kettle, some of him boiling his own wife. However, as the novel continues, the evidence that he presents becomes increasingly more obscure and in addition to this, he begins to interrupt the actual evidence with his own thoughts. The first time he does this he states, “Yes, and I’m a theory man too. Biographer, historian and medium- call me what you want- but even after four years of hard labor I’m left with little more than supposition and possibility” (30). He continues on to state, “I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evidence” (30). Through these statements the narrator is directly stating that although he has evidence, he lacks the truth, and in essence all he can truly do is recreate events to the best of his