Did John kill Kathy?

At the end of the novel we are given the opportunity to determine our own version of what happened that night at The Lake of the Woods.

Seven hypotheses are given to us, along with seven chapters of evidence and an insight into the lives of those involved, and what brought them to that point.

We’ve explored the possibility that John had in fact killed Kathy but not solely by his own means or motivation.

Veterans of war, especially from Vietnam have been known to act aggressively, even to those they love. And as quoted in the novel “he’d yell in his sleep – loud, desperate, obscene things…Her eyes (Kathy) would betray visible fear. “It wasn’t even your voice,”…”It wasn’t even you”. “Waking up with your hands around your wife’s throat is frightening…..Is he Crazy? Does he hate me? What the hell’s going on?”

Soldiers are taught to act without question, to kill without mercy and to obey orders. This is what makes a good soldier, but not a good man, and despite his flaws John wanted to be a good man, and to be loved. However, John was not a good soldier “barely competent” in fact.

“It wasn’t just the war that made him (John) what he was. That’s too easy. It was his whole nature”. John has suffered a lot in his lifetime, his abusive father, and suicide, his distant personality traits, the war, not least of which the My Lai massacre, political loss, marriage troubles and mental breakdowns.

John is a man who cannot cope with loss, yet he has endured so much of it. As a young child John learned to use his mirror to reflect, and warp reality into something else. In time he brought that mirror with him, only in his mind so he could cope. Except with the war it proved to be too much, this is were he adopted his alias Sorcerer. Under his new title John commits sin, and again has trouble accepting reality so he warped it. Like any person, any soldier would, John tries to forget that side of him. As quoted in the book “Every man has some reminiscences … which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away…Man is bound to lie about himself.”

Johns’- troubled childhood and life that followed created another side to John, one were he seems capable of murder because he certainly holds the desire.

“John wanted to kill everybody who was weeping and everybody who wasn’t, everybody, the minister and the mourners and the skinny old lady at the organ – he wanted to grab a hammer and scramble down into the ditch and kill his father for dying.”

John didn’t take part in the massacre at My Lai, but didn’t take part against it either. As a reaction to combat, fear and reflex John had killed, but never to satisfy his hidden desire to kill.

At the night of Kathy’s alleged murder, John was in a night terror were he killed plants with boiling water. This is where on Hypothesis describes Kathy’s murder by John’s crazed hand. After the night of the incident, John appears to have began a new life, his anger was gone, along with his beloved wife Kathy.

John had always had trouble identifying the truth “Everything’s True, Everything’s not true”, as he once put it. But alike in Vietnam he forgot details about what had happened, he came to illogical conclusions, simply because alike Vietnam “This could not have happened. Therefore it did not.”

As the story continues and John searches for Kathy (or her remains) John begins remembering details he rather wouldn’t. So when the search for Kathy comes up empty he borrows a boat in search for her himself. Again his intentions may be debated, weather he was escaping arrest, looking for Kathy, running away with her, etc. But under the assumption he killed her I believe that he was merely looking for those lost truths. To either prove or disprove his guilt because he was as unsure as everyone else.

by Darren, Matt & Jesse