"Our whereabouts are uncertain. All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond the dark there is only maybe." — In the Lake of the Woods, Tim O’Brien
A long time ago, I thought I had everything figured out. Not just the little things in life—everything. I was certain of it. Then I read Tim O’Brien’s novel In the Lake of the Woods.
In its opening pages, the novel seems conventional enough—characters, setting, plot, conflict, vivid scenes; the things we’re taught to expect from fiction. Then you get to the second chapter, titled "Evidence." Fact and fiction collide, and all your expectations get thrown out the window. Evidence from the real world intermingles with evidence from the world of the novel, all footnoted with proper citations, as if you’ve stumbled into a work of nonfiction. The fictional author of the book begins to interject through these footnotes, speaking as the first-person narrator behind the third-person scenes.
The story becomes a vortex of uncertainty. What you thought were scenes building to a proper crisis and resolution turn out to be the narrator’s attempts to solve a mystery by recreating past events from an incomplete body of evidence full of contradictions and unanswered questions. The main characters aren’t even characters—they’re fictions within the larger fiction. At some point, you realize the narrator is the protagonist of the book, and you, the reader, are part of it, too, because the narrator is talking directly to you, and between the two of you and all the conflicting evidence, you have no idea what really happened.
I’d never read anything like it. Still, as I turned the last few pages I thought I had it figured out. I waited for the narrator to reveal that one key piece of evidence he was holding back, the detail that would tie everything together. I was sure I knew the answer to the mystery.
I was wrong.
The final chapter presents another hypothesis, no more or less plausible than those offered before it. The final sentences are questions. There are no answers.
Seriously? I turned back to the beginning and read the book again, searching for clues I’d missed, searching for answers. No such luck. The more I searched, the less certainty I found. I had become like the story’s fictional narrator, consumed by the need to solve a mystery I couldn’t solve.
And that was the point: O’Brien’s story doesn’t have a conclusion. It was up to me to decide which hypothesis, if any, I thought was true. Here is the evidence, such as it is believed to be. Make your choice. By participating in the story, I had become responsible for its meaning. It was liberating, and a little terrifying. And that jolt of terror was the point, too. A nudge out of the complacency and false certainty of the settled perspective. A reminder that we are, as Robert Stone once wrote, “the stories we tell ourselves about the experience of life.”
Like O’Brien’s narrator, I wanted to choose the happy ending, and like the narrator, I couldn’t go through with it:
My heart tells me to stop right here, to offer some quiet benediction and call it an end. But truth won’t allow it. Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. Nothing is fixed, nothing is solved. The facts, such as they are, finally spin off into the void of things missing, the inconclusiveness of conclusion. Mystery finally claims us.
So I left In the Lake of the Woods as it was, ending with questions instead of answers. I chose to embrace the uncertainty, the mystery, the secrets that would never be revealed. Maybe you would choose differently. You could, if you wanted to. If it felt true to your story. That’s the beauty of literature. That’s the beauty of life.
This post is part of our annual Lit Matters series, in which writers and readers express why supporting and elevating literary arts—the mission of Lighthouse Writers Workshop— is important to them. If you agree, consider supporting Lighthouse on Colorado Gives Day. Mark your calendar for December 8 or schedule your gift now. Thank you!
Mark Springer is a freelance writer and editor (MarkSpringerCreative.com), and a proud Lighthouse member. He also blogs about speculative fiction at FictionUnbound.com and sometimes teaches Scrivener writing software boot camps at Lighthouse. If not for writing deadlines, he might have disappeared into the mountains a long time ago.
