52 pages • 1 hour read
Mark Z. DanielewskiHouse Of Leaves
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
The first section is narrated by Johnny Truant and printed in Courier font, as are all sections narrated by Johnny. (Different portions of House of Leaves are in different fonts.) In this multi-layered narrative, Johnny’s sections comment on and frame The Navidson Record, the document composed by Zampanò and printed in Times New Roman font.
Johnny writes the Introduction from Hollywood, California in 1998. He reports that he is covered in blood and is considering shooting someone with his gun. He has first encountered The Navidson Record in the winter of 1996. Lude, a friend of Johnny’s, call him over late one night to his apartment building. An elderly man named Zampanò has just died, and Lude has the keys to his apartment. The two men enter the apartment to find that all windows, vents, and doors have been sealed up. On the floor, they see “jagged bits of wood clawed up by something neither of us cared to imagine” (xvii). They find the manuscript, The Navidson Record, which consists of “reams and reams” that Zampanò wrote about a fictional film called The Navidson Record (xix).
Johnny takes the manuscript home, at first reading it for only an hour at time. Gradually he “[loses] sense of time,” and finds himself reading for hours on end (xviii). He stops going out and seeing people. Eventually, he seals up his apartment in the way Zampanò did. Johnny realizes the The Navidson Record does not exist as a film, and most of the footnotes and people Zampanò interviews in his report are fictional or, alternately, that the interview never took place.
In closing, Johnny addresses the reader and says, “with any luck, you’ll dismiss this labor […] Then again, there’s a good chance you won’t” (xxii). After reading the ensuing report, the reader will detect “slow and subtle shifts” in their realities, and no longer take comfort in life as they previously did (xxiii).
Chapter 1 Summary
Chapter 1 begins The Navidson Record, the manuscript composed by Zampanò. It contains footnotes written by Zampanò, as well as footnotes by Johnny in Courier font. The Editors also begin making notes in Bookman font to comment on Johnny’s footnotes.
Zampanò’s comments and describes the film The Navidson Record, which is considered by many to be “a hoax of exceptional quality” (3). The film is a documentary shot by Will Navidson, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning photojournalist. As the novel reveals later, Will Navidson and his partner, Karen Green, move into a house on Ash Tree Lane in the Virginia countryside with their two children, Daisy and Chad. Before The Navidson Record is released in its entirety in April 1993, two short films are released unofficially on VHS.
Seven years prior, Will Navidson had released the film The Five and a Half Minute Hallway. In it, Will opens a doorway in his house that leads to a long, ten-foot hallway. By moving back and forth inside and outside in a continuous shot, he shows how the hallway is physical impossible. Will reaches in his hand to the hallway and reports that the temperature is freezing in the hallway, but not outside of it.
A year later, an eight-minute short film called Exploration #4 is released. It is “highly discontinuous, jarring,” and contains broken dialogue from Will, as well as shots of the interior and exterior of the house, and a shot of blood on the kitchen floor (5). Holloway Roberts, who has been enlisted to explore the hallway, appears in the film and reports that he is lost in the house and something is stalking him, “but for some reason it’s not attacking” (5).
Interest in the short films die out until Miramax runs a limited release of The Navidson Record. It gains cultural and academic interest, with books and magazine articles written about it. It remains an “enigma,” and Zampanò predicts it will gain cult status (7).
Zampanò quotes several sources and refers to their texts in the footnotes, as he continues to do throughout the novel.
The Editors’ notes specify that Zampanò’s and Johnny’s own notes will appear in different fonts.
Johnny’s footnotes translate a quote from Dante’s Inferno and specify the release date of The Navidson Record.
Chapter 2 Summary
Zampanò conducts an analysis of the opening minutes of the film The Navidson Record, which portray both the film actually shot and the one Navidson “set out to make” (8). The opening shots convey a “prevailing bliss,” showing the house being unpacked and interviews with the children (17). Will wants to start a new life with his family in Virginia, and Zampanò argues that this is the original intention of The Navidson Record. Critics like Dr. Isaiah Rosen claim that the film is “a fraud from frame one,” and the early, positive scenes are constructed and acted for the benefit of what comes later (8).
Zampanò counters Rosen’s claim by offering a detailed analysis of two early scenes, which portray how the film is about starting a new life and about how “Will and Karen need each other yet how difficult they find handling and communicating those feelings” (16). In the first scene, Will lovingly touches Karen’s jewelry box, demonstrating her care for her. In the second scene, Karen anxiously awaits Will’s return and is very relieved when he comes home, though she doesn’t show it.
Johnny’s footnotes begin by bemoaning a broken water heater, which leads to a cold shower the morning after a drunken night he spends with Lude. The two begin talking to girls at a bar, and Lude encourages Johnny to fabricate the story of when he was a “Pit Boxer” in Houston (12). In this fabricated tale, Johnny has been working on a barge and owes money to the captain, so he leaves one night and is about to be robbed by someone named Punching Bag. The two fight, and Johnny wins. When Punching Bag says Johnny is a Pit Boxer, Johnny beings fighting twice a week in a dirt ring while people make bets on him; all the while, however, the fights have been fixed. Johnny bets all his money on himself the last night, at the insistence of the head of Punching Bag. Just before he loses, he says that the material on the barge is worth thousands. After colluding with the Captain, they convince Punching Bag that they have drugs, and Punching Bag pays for several crates, which turn out to be exotic birds.
Chapter 3 Summary
Zampanò opens the chapter by asking two questions: “Why Navidson? Why not someone else?” (19). He reflects on Will’s “bleak” childhood (22). Will had an unpredictable, alcoholic father who was prone to violent outbursts and who left the family for days on end. His mother was an aspiring actress who left the family and eventually disappeared. Zampanò uses outside sources to corroborate these stories.
Some critics claim that the horrors of the house are “merely manifestations of [Will’s] own troubled psyche” (21). However, Zampanò counters that many people have lived in the house and encountered similar issues.
Given Will’s talents as a photographer as well as his emotional issues from childhood, Zampanò concludes, “It is inevitable that someone like Navidson would eventually enter those rooms” and “only Navidson could have gone as deep as he did and still have successfully brought that vision back” (23).
Johnny writes his footnotes in March of 1997, three months after the discovery of the manuscript. Like Zampanò, Johnny questions why he is on this journey. The simple answer is that Lude called him over to the apartment building one night. Johnny does not want to consider the complicated answer yet. In the following months, Johnny has tried to get the manuscript published, but “[n]o one wanted the old man’s words—except me” (20). Johnny also considers why he and Lude are friends, and it seems mostly because Lude likes Johnny’s stories, many of which are fabricated.
Introduction-Chapter 3 Analysis
These initial chapters delve into the development of the main characters, all of which are affected by isolation and disconnection. Zampanò is an elderly man who spends most of his time writing in his apartment, “alone in that pisshole” (xiv). He has no family and no identification aside from his surname. Once Johnny begins reading The Navidson Record, he grows “more disoriented, [and] increasingly more detached from the world” (xvii). Like Zampanò, he shuts the world out and delves deeper and deeper into the constructed world of the manuscript. To a lesser extent, Will and Karen also experience isolation and disconnection. Though they live together, they suffer “increased alienation and untold personal difficulties” (10). Will travels a great deal for work and thus leaves Karen on her own, which creates a rift between them.
The novel also touches on themes of deep instability and the slipperiness of “truth,” specifically through narration. After doing research, Johnny discovers that the film The Navidson Record does not exist. In effect, Zampanò writes about a work that is entirely fictionalized. In his own writing, Zampanò comments on the instability of the film itself and how it can “slip the limits of any one of those genres” (3). Here, the fictional film itself is elusive and is the subject of much controversy. In effect, we are reading about a subject that may or may not exist in the reality of the novel.
Johnny’s own narration is also unstable. He readily admits to fabricating stories, such as the one he tells about the exotic birds and his scars. He also admits to altering The Navidson Record. When Zampanò originally writes “heater” on page 12, Johnny admits to changing it to “water heater,” relating it to his own narrative of his water heater being broken. By altering the source text, Johnny makes the reader question even further the stability of the information presented.
Throughout all of this, the novel establishes a stylistic pattern of mirroring, which adds to the overarching sense of instability. Johnny’s trajectory begins to mirror Zampanò’s as he starts reading. Johnny also reaches out across the frame of the book to the reader and asserts that this behavioral pattern will come for them as well: “You’ll care only about the darkness and you’ll watch it for hours” (xxiii). The Navidson Record has the same effect on everyone, since it is such a destabilizing object. Similarly, the house on Ash Tree Lane has the same effects on all its inhabitants. Many have lived there and experienced horrors, but Will is the only one who is able to document them. Here, the objects in the text create the same effects on all those who experience them.
