Previous
Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in House Taken Over, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Home and Identity
Fear of the Unknown
The Past
Summary
Analysis
An unnamed narrator and his sister Irene live in Buenos Aires together in the family home they inherited. The house holds the memories of many generations that came before them. It’s old and spacious, big enough to hold eight people comfortably. The siblings follow an extremely regular routine, waking early to clean the expansive space until lunch, which they always have at noon.
From the first sentence, the siblings’ home is established as a holder of ancestral memory. Both the house and the family were once grand, but now the two remaining members of the family are dwarfed by this enormous house (which is an emblem of their past), showing how their past might be stifling to them.
Active
Themes
Maintaining the house is such difficult work that the narrator and Irene blame it for their never marrying—Irene rejected two suitors, and the narrator’s former partner died before they could get engaged. Both siblings are nearing their forties, and because neither has children, they are certain that the family line will end with them. The narrator is afraid that when they die, the house will be passed on to an unknown relative who will sell it for scrap. So, he and his sister may eventually have the house torn down.
The narrator and Irene have been prioritizing the house over their romantic lives, which the narrator here seems to bemoan—but as the story goes on, the possibility will arise that they’ve been using the house as an excuse to stay away from others for many years. In fact, their attachment to their family home is so intense that they refuse to let anyone else have it, planning to destroy it before their deaths.
Active
Themes
Irene is an unassuming person; after the daily cleaning is finished, she spends all her time knitting. She knits useful things, but often she will unravel and reknit any garment that is not perfect. Though neither sibling leaves the house often, the narrator enjoys going into town occasionally to pick out new skeins for yarn for Irene, who appreciates his taste. While there, he will also stop into the bookstore to see if there are any new volumes of French literature in stock. There never are, nor have there been any in Argentina since 1939, so he spends his time reading the books he already has.
The narrator doesn’t consider himself important, so he wants to focus on the house and Irene. He wonders what Irene would do without her knitting and observes that while books can always be reread, once a sweater is complete, there’s nothing more to do. One day he finds a large stash of Irene’s finished knitted pieces that have clearly been untouched for a long time, and he does not understand what she hopes to do with them. There is enough to stock her own store, but they have no need for money, as they make a good amount of passive income from their inherited family farms. Though the narrator believes Irene knits excessively, he feels great joy watching her work.
Active
Themes
Get the entire House Taken Over LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
The narrator affectionately describes the layout of their house. One enters through a tiled vestibule with an iron gate. Next are the siblings’ bedrooms, which sit opposite a small living area. Further in are the turnoffs for the bathroom and kitchen, and just past there lies a massive oak door. Behind it is the bigger part of the house, containing additional bedrooms and communal spaces, including the dining room, larger living room, and library. This portion of the home is the closest to the Rodriguez Pena, a main thoroughfare in Buenos Aires. When the door closes off these rooms, the narrator imagines that he and Irene live in a normal-sized apartment.
Active
Themes
One night, while Irene is knitting, the narrator gets up to brew maté. Before he turns into the kitchen, he hears faint noises from the rear rooms that sound like buzzing conversation or someone knocking things around. He hears the sound moving into the hallway and toward the oak door that leads into the back part of the house, so he closes and locks the door on the mysterious presence. When he tells Irene that “they’ve taken over,” the siblings decide to permanently bar off the back portion of the home. They are sad to lose things they left there, like the narrator’s French literature and pipe or Irene’s slippers and Hesperidin, but otherwise they merely shift their routine to fit into the smaller area.
With no need to spend the morning maintaining the communal rooms behind the door, the siblings have much more time on their hands. Irene is happy because she can knit, and the narrator spends time reordering his father’s stamp collection since he doesn’t have books to read. Neither seems interested in going out to find replacements for their lost items. They also adjust their schedule so all cooking is completed by early afternoon, allowing them to spend nearly the entire day in Irene’s room. Eventually, they are so tuned in to their routine that they no longer need to think at all. But the narrator asserts that thinking is not needed to live.
Active
Themes
The narrator often hears Irene talking in her sleep in a strange, disembodied voice that he imagines comes straight from her dreams. She, in turn, hears him thrashing in his sleep most nights. Aside from these nocturnal noises, the house remains quiet. In the daytime, there are the soft noises of knitting or stamp collection pages being flipped. When the siblings are in the kitchen or bathroom, they make excessive noise with the dishes or talk loudly so that they cannot hear anything coming from the rooms on the other side of the wall. Any displeasure with their reduced lifestyle is reflected only in their fitful sleeping habits.
Active
Themes
The narrator wakes in the silence of the night and gets up for a glass of water, much the same way he did the night they lost the back rooms. In the hallway, still within Irene’s eyesight, he freezes when he hears the odd muffled noises of the mysterious presence once more, this time coming from the bathroom or kitchen.
Active
Themes
Noticing the narrator’s reaction, Irene gets up. They listen as the sounds get closer. Without discussing it, they flee at the same time. Standing in the vestibule behind the closer iron grate, they both realize they have lost the house entirely. “They’ve taken over our section,” Irene says. The piece of knitting Irene was working on is still in her hand, though the skein she was working from is trapped in the house. She abandons it and the unfinished garment.
Standing alone outside the house, the narrator and Irene realize they have nothing but what they are wearing. There are 15,000 pesos left in the narrator’s dresser drawer, but it is beyond his reach now. He looks at his wristwatch and notes that it’s 11 p.m. Then, he and Irene embrace, and he sees that she’s crying. Before they leave their home forever, the narrator locks the door and then throws his house key in the gutter. He does not want anyone to go in after they are gone, neither to loot their belongings nor to encounter the mysterious presence that took over their home.
