Disassociating in the Face of Free Will: Fatalism and Morality in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods
The magic of Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods is not the tricks John Wade performs, but the gravitational force that removes one’s ability to control their participation and reaction to those tricks. The sorcery that overwhelms a reader’s intrinsic judgment and sensibility while trying to pick apart the narrative, hypotheses, and evidence portions of the novel parallels a magician’s source of power as spectators are confronted with phenomena without attainable explanation. In this case, free will becomes a fictitious commodity, one that a magician can exploit in order to retain an air of mystery. Psychologically, free will is questionable when confronted with mental illness, and the combination of mental illness and sorcery severely limits the freedoms of both magician and spectator. Through John’s struggle with his mental health, specifically his episodes of varying types of disassociation, In the Lake of the Woods explores the nature of free will—especially in the hands of a magician. John’s mental illness combined with his affair with fatalism creates the illusion of absolution in the face of denied free will; thereby manipulating the reader’s own moral compass and denying them the comfort of definitively decide Kathy’s fate.
John Wade is a master manipulator. He lies to himself to forget the past, uses magic to escape reality, and relies on politics to ensure his future. His ever-shifting connection to himself and the world around him manifests as some kind of personality disorder, perhaps schizoid or borderline, even as a young child. Symptoms such as disassociations, delusions, violent thoughts and urges, paranoia, and a severe fear of abandonment contribute to his inability to form healthy bonds with other people. His father’s emotional abuse created a fragile self-image in John, which is why he often found himself in front of the mirror performing magic tricks. Witnessing the magic turns John into a spectator, freeing him to believe “[e]verything was possible [in the mirror], even happiness” (O’Brien, p. 65). This is perhaps John’s first dalliance with disassociation. He may be watching himself, but he creates magic through a body and mind that isn’t quite his own. It’s the first of many tricks that both John and the reader are subject to.
Once John begins imagining his father is offering him affection and comfort in the mirror, his fixation with the power of his reflection devolves into a replacement for reality. John loses himself completely behind the glass of the mirror in his mind, the place where “he could turn bad things into good things and just be happy” (p. 66). Watching the world from behind a barrier (the glass, for example) is a specific form of disassociation called derealization. John’s escape behind his mind’s mirror is an effort to put away the boy behind the magic and instead assume the position of “Magician.” John pretends he has no free will; he relinquishes it to the magician inside of him—a magician who’d later be named “Sorcerer.” It is possible John’s subconscious tries to resist the magician’s thrall, as his mother reports that even as a child he slept like a war veteran: “He couldn’t stay asleep. It was as if he were on guard or something, tensed up, waiting for… well, I don’t know what” (p. 29).
After his father dies, John’s psyche devolves further into delusions and perhaps even hallucinations. He pretends to search for his father, knowing his father is dead but searching for him anyway because it’s something to do—something to pretend. At one point, John imagines finding a tiny version of his father in the grass and feels “a hinge swing open” before picking his father up and putting him in his pocket (p. 15). In this moment, the average reader will either find John’s peculiarity endearing or become dubious of his sanity—it all depends on how enchanted the reader is with the narrative. Still, the modality of freedom to sympathize or scrutinize John’s behavior is still under the reader’s control.
As he grows into a young adult and begins dating Kathy, John expresses a pathological fear of losing her. “The trick was to make her love him and never stop,” the narrator tells us, exemplifying John’s obsession with using “magic tricks” to make sure Kathy doesn’t abandon him (p. 32). When he starts to spy on Kathy, John claims his actions are Kathy’s fault, because her “fiercely private” personality was a magnet for his compulsion to perform magical miracles of insight. By pretending that his knowing of her is predetermined, he has no choice but to comply. Once he learns private details about Kathy, he uses that knowledge to, as Robert Parish states, “appear to do what is manifestly impossible [which] can help make you a fascinating and amusing personality” (p. 27). Kathy then comments on how strange it is that John knows so much about her, leaving John to not only feel a secret thrill over having deceived her so expertly, but also validated in his delusional submission to gravity. John’s manipulation alters the reader’s perception of him, but that perception is questioned again when it’s revealed that Kathy knew about the stalking all along and was simply unperturbed because she loved him and eventually found the deception interesting. “[H]e was a klutz and Kathy always knew about it,” one classmate testified (p. 191). Another witness commented, “[i]t was like she needed to be a part of it [. . .] [t]hat whole sick act of his” (p. 95). This presentation of narrative and evidence is more overt in its goal to confuse the reader’s judgment of John’s character. Is he a harmless barney or a manipulative bastard? Considering his history and mental health, can we blame him if he is a manipulative bastard?
The impression of John’s character shifts again after his alter-ego, Sorcerer, is formally introduced after gliding across enemy territory in Vietnam and killing a sniper. Despite what the narrative suggests, the war doesn’t create Sorcerer, it simply transitions Sorcerer away from a delusion John knowingly indulges in and toward a disassociated autonomous being that can actually operate outside of John’s control. In the moment before Sorcerer kills the sniper, John experiences another type of disassociation called depersonalization. In this case, he has an “out-of-body” experience: “There was no real decision. He’d lost touch with his own volition, his own arms and legs [. . .] not running, just a fast winging, disconnected glide” (pg. 40). This is the moment that cements Sorcerer’s claim to John and legitimately removes his free will. Through Sorcerer, John’s belief in fatalism is realized. His actions are inevitable because they are out of his control, and he can rationalize his experience through the laws of nature.
When the massacre at My Lai is upon Sorcerer, he attempts to hide behind the mirrors in John’s mind, but those mirrors aren’t for Sorcerer. John puts the mirrors in his mind so that he can watch himself pretending to be Sorcerer. As an agent of fatalism, Sorcerer ends up submitting to the sun’s gravitational pull and moves toward the village while watching “brightly mobile figures [engage] in murder” (p. 107). Then, after witnessing too many vile and deplorable acts of violence, Sorcerer loses an undetermined amount of time. Losing time is a symptom of dissociative amnesia—or the inability to recall memories or other important information. This is different than Post Traumatic Stress memory repression, as you have to acknowledge the existence of a memory in order to repress it. It’s important to recognize the distinction between John disassociating and Sorcerer disassociating. When John derealizes his reality behind the mirror in his mind, or depersonalizes and submits to the gravity Sorcerer imposes on his body, John’s still there—he’s just lost in the fantasy of Sorcerer’s magic. When Sorcerer disassociates, John’s mind fractures into a labyrinth of disassociation, like a dream within a dream as demonstrated in the movie Inception. Already outside of his body and operating as Sorcerer, John’s mind has nowhere to go but deeper inside of himself. This triggers the dissociative amnesia, which further challenges the reader’s ability to find John culpable for his actions.
The “forgetting trick” that John performs after leaving Vietnam “mostly worked” (p. 109), but he continues to be haunted by the things he witnessed—a clear sign of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which adds severe psychological and physiological panic and fear responses to his already long list of mental illness symptoms. By the time John arrives at the lake in the woods, he’s two distinct people sharing the same body. He’s John, the deeply humiliated and despondent man who’s lost an important election, but he’s also Sorcerer, the entity with an “electric sizzle” in his blood that feels a “tight, pumped-up killing rage” inside (p. 5). After the war, as John makes a career in politics, he uses Sorcerer’s talents to get ahead, but at no point does John experience trauma so profound while pretending to be Sorcerer that Sorcerer had to also disassociate and therefore make John disappear. However, the stress of being outed as a war criminal in such a spectacular fashion creates a vacuum of potential energy that has no clear avenue for release. John’s mental illness may provide him with the ability to turn off his emotional responses to distress by pretending to be Sorcerer, but his PTSD demands he address the trauma that’s been exposed. Judith Herman testifies that “[a]fter a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go into permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment” (p. 28).
The night John wakes just before midnight, sweaty, “brain sick,” and curled around Kathy, he dares Sorcerer to take over. He’s spent several days at the lake by this point, and he’s yet to meaningfully connect with his new reality, instead making promises he knows he won’t keep and refusing to discuss the trauma that ails him. He’s presented with too many choices in the face of unprocessed trauma, and he’d rather escape into the abyss that Sorcerer can provide. So when John says “Kill Jesus,” he may very well be daring Sorcerer to kill him, knowing that as a magician he’ll rise again—especially after Sorcerer fixes the mess John’s found himself in. That’s what Sorcerer has always done in the past—he makes John’s father care for him, he helps John seem attractive and interesting to Kathy, he keeps dark, torturing secrets, and sometimes he protects John from grievous trauma. Sorcerer is a problem solver.
The depersonalization begins in the moments right before John picks up the teakettle. After indulging in violent fantasies and “confiding in the void” that is Sorcerer’s power of disassociation, he gives the steam a “meaningless smile” and eggs Sorcerer on with another request to “Kill Jesus” (pp. 48-9). The turning on of the lamp as he enters the living room is peculiar, since his next actions are that of a man who is in the process of breaking with reality, but it could just be a signal to the reader that John is still in possession of his faculties. As the boiled water is poured over a series of potted plants, the mood changes from melancholy to alarming, and John’s reaction to the produced aroma is an indication of how quickly he’s submitting to the perceived inevitable. He says, “Well now” and “Oh my,” but the laugh between is knowing—he’s pretending not to know where the night is headed. He’s deluded himself into believing he’s just along for the ride and it works intermittently. Sorcerer exists as an independent being; one John has no awareness of for a “ribbon of time” (p. 50). By this point, the reader is certainly concerned for Kathy’s well-being, especially as John crouches beside her sleeping form with a teakettle full of boiled water, but because of the way the narrative has already manipulated the reader’s perception of guilt and culpability, there is a certain level of disassociation within the reader as well. Acting as both the concerned peer that would hold John responsible for any action Sorcerer takes and the “reluctantly” curious philosopher who’s intrigued by the proceedings enough to want John to commit an act of violence in order to gauge their own reaction to it, the reader becomes John’s proxy—a master manipulator of their own free will. Which begs the question: is the need to disassociate from one’s morality evidence of an agency, or free will, knowingly abandoned?
As the night progresses and John loses more and more time to Sorcerer’s void, the narrative purposely leaves room for Kathy’s murder and the disposal of her body. However, due to the nature of this novel, readers aren’t granted the privilege of knowing for sure what happens to Kathy, and John’s thoroughly examined mental health makes it nearly impossible for readers to decide how they even feel about her disappearance. The manipulative magic of O’Brien’s novel ensures a certain level of discomfort when attempting to decide Kathy’s fate—so much so that it’s difficult to discern the morality of deciding at all. If John is guilty, is he truly guilty?
I’d argue it’s morally questionable to absolve John of a crime because of the free will he once denied and was later helpless to find. It’s also worth mentioning that a willingness to submit to one’s fatalistic doppelganger could be considered an exercise in free will. Still, John’s declaration that human choice is a scam, or that the gravity of nature decides our fate, is a seductive concept; one readers are forced to consider when trying to solve the mystery behind the narrative. At the end of the novel, O’Brien suggests that John’s guilt or innocence is simply a reflection of the mirrors in the readers mind—but that’s fatalism. It’s determinism. Readers have a choice in how they interpret a narrative, they simply choose before they pick up the book. Kathy’s fate is linked to a reader’s sentimental or twisted desires—both of which are sure to produce guilt in the face of the alternative. Therefore, definitively deciding Kathy’s fate becomes a liability to the reader—one best left alone.
Works Cited
O’Brien, Tim. In the Lake of the Woods. First Mariner Books, 1994.
“Disassociation FAQs.” International Society for the Study of Trauma and Disassociation,
https://www.isst-d.org/resources/dissociation-faqs/. Accessed 27, Oct. 2020.
