39 pages • 1 hour read
In the Lake of the Woods
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Chapters 13-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: The Nature of the Beast
This chapter describes John’s experiences during the Vietnam War in detail: the daily routine of battle; enemies who hid and could never be found or fought openly; the frustration of sudden, unexpected deaths by landmine and sniper.
Kathy writes to John and tells him that she is seeing a couple of other guys and that when he gets home he will need to understand that she wants to have a life of her own. The next day, the men of Charlie Company are dropped by helicopter into a village called Thuan Yen.
John describes four hours of murder and horror as Charlie Company systematically kills every living thing in the village, including animals, old men, women, young girls, little boys, and babies in their mother’s arms. No one was spared. John wanders around in a daze and loses time, observing the carnage around him. In the confusion and insanity of the day, John shoots an old man whom he thought was carrying a rifle that turned out to be a hoe. As things become more and more unreal, John eventually finds himself covered in slime and blood at the bottom of a ditch containing 100 bodies. PFC Weatherby approaches him at the edge of the ditch, and John accidentally shoots him. Overwhelmed by the horror of what he has done, John forces himself to forget what has happened.
Chapter 14 Summary: Hypothesis
The narrator reports another theory about Kathy’s disappearance. In this theory, she wakes up in the morning and performs her usual routine of getting dressed: drinking coffee and working on a crossword puzzle. As she completes the puzzle, she imagines talking everything through with John and admitting that she hates everything about politics and that she is glad it’s over. After finding the dead plants, she rushes out of the cabin to get fresh air, to get away. Taking the boat out, she imagines telling him that things have to change, but they can still save their relationship. However, he has to stop spying on her and lying to her for things to work between them. Not being an experienced sailor, she hits a sandbar and she drowns.
Chapter 15 Summary: What the Questions Were
County Sherriff Art Lux arrives at the cabin early on the morning of September 20, and he organizes a search of the lake. The Sherriff and a local deputy, Vinnie Pearson, also question John. John’s story, with its holes and missing time, sounds lame. He reports that everything was fine between them. He got up to make tea at midnight and she was still there, but was gone when he woke at noon. He waited all day and evening for her to show up, before going to the Rasmussen’s place, drunk, at about midnight. Under questioning, everything comes out: the phone being disconnected and hidden, a fight observed at the grocery store, Wade waiting so long to get help. They question him about other men that Kathy might have been seeing, and whether she has run away before. When asked about relatives, John admits that he hasn’t called Kathy’s sister, Pat.
After the police leave to continue the search, Ruth Rasmussen fixes dinner. The Rasmussens are staying with him to offer support. John reaches Kathy’s sister, Pat, who has already seen news of Kathy’s disappearance on the news and announces that she’ll be there the next day.
Chapter 16 Summary: Evidence
This chapter contains testimony and reports from the court martial proceedings of the men involved in the Thuan Yen massacre, better known as the My Lai massacre, including the court martial of Lt. William Calley, who ordered the killings. The crimes that the soldiers admit to are harrowing, including the murder, mutilation, rape, and sodomy of the living and the dead—young and old, men, women, children, and babies. The final estimate of the number of civilian villagers murdered that day is 504. O’Brien also provides quotations from accounts of other massacres, including Little Big Horn.
Chapter 17 Summary: The Nature of Politics
After his experience at Thuan Yen, John loses part of himself and he extends his tour in Vietnam for another year in the hopes that he can redeem himself. Kathy writes to him tersely, believing that he’s making some kind of future political career move.
John tries to learn to be a good soldier, and he is wounded twice. He returns home in November 1969 with many decorations.
He marries Kathy five months later. He goes to law school, graduates, and passes the bar exam on his first attempt. He works for the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party as a legislative assistant. In 1976 he runs for the State Senate. As he says, “All the tricks were working” (149).
Tony Carbo works as his election manager, and John wins State Senate seats in 1976 and 1980. Tony runs a slick campaign, and he advises John and Kathy how to act and how to win. John is good at the statehouse politics, and he loves it. All the manipulation and deal-making feel familiar to him. He is a rising star.
Carbo questions John about his past, asking him if there is anything that could harm him, politically. John insists that there is nothing; he’s clean.
They prepare to run for lieutenant governor. When Kathy announces that she’s pregnant in 1982, they agree that the timing isn’t right: Kathy has an abortion. They never discuss it, but this event permanently damages their relationship.
Chapter 18 Summary: Hypothesis
In this chapter, the narrator explores another theory in which Kathy leaves in the boat that morning after discovering the dead plants; this time she gets lost on the lake. Kathy ruminates about her relationship with John; she knew all along about the spying and the secrets, and this jaunt in the boat was meant to be a temporary escape from John’s intrusive, possessive behavior, just as her affair with the dentist, Harmon, was. She spends the night on an island, making a fire and planning to start fresh and get herself home the next day.
Chapter 13-18 Analysis
The chapters on the Thuan Yen massacre reveal the depth of the trauma John suffered in Vietnam. John is just one soldier, but he embodies the damage done to all soldiers during war, while the depiction of the massacre reveals the damage done to helpless civilians. John’s lack of emotion upon discovering Kathy’s disappearance makes sense from the perspective of all the death and destruction he’s endured, no matter how much he loves Kathy.
Another perspective would be that John shows so little emotion and delays taking action for so long because he knows Kathy is dead, because he killed her. The loss of time and memory he experiences on the night of Kathy’s disappearance mirrors the loss of time and memory he underwent during the Thuan Yen massacre. In light of his actions at Thuan Yen, the reader must decide if John is capable of killing Kathy.
It seems unlikely that John killed Kathy given that, during the Thuan Yen massacre, he was largely paralyzed, wandering around too traumatized to act: both murders he commits arise from instinctive reactions during moments of fear and are essentially accidents. Pouring boiling water over his sleeping wife seems grotesquely out of character, even for a narcissistic psychotic. Though the reader might find it difficult to feel compassion for John in general, his psychological damage is both frightening and pitiful. He does not seem to have the mental resources to kill Kathy, dispose of her body, and then clean up all the mess.
These chapters also make it clear that Kathy knew about John’s spying, his identity as Sorcerer, and about an unspecified trauma in Vietnam, and she did not want to know about any of it, or for John to get the help he needed. For her own reasons, she was complicit in John’s obsessive behaviors. Perhaps these behaviors seemed like passion to her, like love, rather than signs of a disturbing mania.
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By Tim O'Brien
