Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Door in the Wall, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Reality, Fantasy, Dreams, and Visions
Ambition and Material Success vs Contentment and Joy
The Lost Golden Past
Summary
Analysis
Wallace asks Redmond if, during their school days, he ever played a game with Wallace called North-West Passage, but Redmond never did. Wallace explains that the game was of the sort that every imaginative kid played. In this game, the goal was to leave for school ten minutes early going in the wrong direction, and then to find a new route and still arrive on time through unfamiliar streets. Wallace recalls that one day while playing North-West Passage he got lost and thought he would be late to school.
It is noteworthy that, even as a schoolboy, Wallace enjoys inventing opportunities for work and ambition, even if the competition is only against himself. Wallace plays a game that challenges him and requires curiosity, persistence, and exploration: the qualities that led him to enter the door in the wall in the first place. However, the game becomes a source of anxiety for Wallace when it seems that he might actually lose. Wallace enjoys the ambition of the game, but with that ambition comes the risk of unhappiness.
Themes
Wallace desperately rushes down a street that he fears is a dead end, but finds a passage through it and begins to hope he might not end up being late after all. He passes a row of inexplicably familiar shops and then comes across a long white wall with a green door: the door to the enchanted garden. Wallace realizes with a jolt that the garden, which he had come to think was just a dream, was actually real.
Wallace realizes where he is only when he sees the door itself. He does not immediately connect the surrounding shops to his experience in the garden, again indicating his imperfect memory of his first encounter with the door. His immediate reaction to seeing the door in his waking life is surprise. Wallace himself had come to believe that the door was just a childhood fantasy of his—a fact that makes the reader grapple anew with whether the door that Wallace sees now is in fact real or a fantasy.
Themes
The adult Wallace interrupts the story at this moment to comment that his second experience with the door shows the difference between the concerns of a young child and those of a busy schoolboy. Wallace says that he didn’t even consider going through the door. He tells Redmond that he must have felt at least some draw to go through the door, but that he experienced this draw primarily as another obstacle to his desire to get to school and preserve his record for punctuality. That isn’t to say he wasn’t greatly excited by his discovery of the door, and his mind was full of the door as he ran on and got to school on time, but he never tried to enter it. The adult Wallace looks at Redmond thoughtfully, and then adds that of course he didn’t know the door wasn’t going to still be there later.
Wallace identifies the differences between his first and second encounters with the door as related to age and responsibility. In his first, very young encounter, he had no obligations preventing him from stepping through the door—only the knowledge of his father’s disapproval. As a schoolboy, however, his responsibilities at school take precedence for him over the garden, absolutely preventing him from entering the door that morning. In fact, his obligations consume him so much that he doesn’t even consider it. The door is not only incompatible with Wallace’s school schedule—it is an “obstacle” to it, actively luring him away from his ambitions and obligations. The adult Wallace further makes clear here that, as a schoolboy, he did not yet understand that there was a tension between the garden and the real world— that to choose school is to leave behind the happiness of the garden. Unaware of the opposition of ambition and happiness, the young Wallace is able to go to school believing that he can have both: that he can fulfill his responsibilities and return later to find the happiness of the garden waiting for him.
Themes
At school that day, Wallace is fidgety and inattentive, thinking of the strange and wonderful people he would see again soon when he returned to where he had seen the door in the wall. He is certain that the people in the garden will be glad to see him. He imagines the garden as a nice place he can go to take breaks from the stresses of school. He does not go to the garden that day, or the next, for reasons he can’t entirely explain.
Wallace’s lack of attention in school reveals again the tension between the idea of the garden and the practical obligations of his life. Preoccupied with the door in the wall, he is unable to devote himself fully to his schoolwork, and instead he turns inward to live in the memory of the garden. Again, Wallace believes that he can have both his practical ambitions and the peace of the garden; he imagines treating the garden as a place for a break from his real life, where he can come and go as he pleases. In his memory, it is an idyllic place, a golden past of perfect companionship. He feels sure—as he did when he first saw the door and knew it would be unlocked—that his friends wait for him and love him still.
Themes
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Yet Wallace is so preoccupied by thoughts of the garden that he is unable to keep it to himself. Even though he has the feeling he shouldn’t, he tells another boy about the garden as they walk home from school.
In telling another boy about the garden, Wallace risks being called a liar, as he was when he was first told his father about the door in the wall. However, with his new surety that the door in the wall and the garden are real, he now reveals the secret again. He didn’t speak of the garden to friends at school when he thought it was only a dream, but once it becomes a concrete reality for him, he finds himself unable to stop thinking—and talking—about it.
Themes
This boy quickly tells Wallace’s secret, and the next day Wallace finds himself surrounded by six bigger boys at school, who tease him but also want to hear more about the garden. Wallace is both flattered by the attention from these older boys and disgusted and ashamed with himself for having revealed what he considers a sacred secret. One of the boys, Carnaby, makes a crass joke about the tall girl Wallace met in the garden.
The boys are skeptical of Wallace’s story, and, like Redmond, interested in the question of whether or not the door in the wall is real. Wallace both enjoys the sudden social status he has gained in the notice of the older boys, and is haunted by the shame of sharing the secret of his golden past—a space meant to be untouchable and innocent, now marred by the attention and crudeness of the other boys.
Themes
When Carnaby calls Wallace a liar, Wallace swears that his story is true. To prove himself, he claims that he knows where to find the green door and can lead all the boys there. Carnaby tells Wallace that if he doesn’t, he’ll suffer for it.
It is important to Wallace that his audience believe his story. He talks about the door in the wall three times: to his father, to his schoolmates, and to Redmond. Only in Redmond does he find a listener who believes him at the time of the telling without proof. With the schoolboys, he must offer evidence that the door in the wall is real and not just a lie or a childish fantasy.
Themes
Wallace leads the way to the garden, nervous, flushed, and teary-eyed. He again feels misery and shame for having shared a special secret with his threatening schoolmates. And, in the end, Wallace can’t find the green door, though he tried both then with the boys and later on his own. The boys mock Wallace, and Carnaby in particular makes his life miserable.
In this instance, as always, Wallace is unable to provide concrete proof of the garden to anyone else; when he tries to share it, it exists only in Wallace’s memory and the faith of his listener. Wallace’s desire to merge the two worlds of the garden and his school by talking about the garden and finding it again later lead him only to more shame: both for sullying his idyllic golden past of the garden with the sneers of his schoolmates and for the ridicule he receives for his “lie.” His desire for success in this social situation, like in his racing-to-school-game and in his academic career, makes him already incompatible with the leisurely garden, where the very idea of advancement is foreign.
Themes
Wallace cries himself to sleep that night: not over his schoolmates’ mockery, but because he now realized that he would not be able to return to the garden with his old playmates and the friendly women. He continues to look for the door throughout his school days but is never able to find it, and suffers from the belief that if he had not told anyone, he would have been able to find it again. For two terms, he slacks off in school and gets bad grades, until Redmond beats him in math and he devotes his attention to “the grind” again.
At this point, Wallace has begun to understand that the door in the wall exists in tension with the “real” world. It is not available to him in times of leisure; rather, to guarantee his entry into the garden, he must take the opportunity as soon as he sees it, despite his conflicting obligations. His belief that he could have found the door again if he had not told anyone further highlights the tension between reality and fantasy. In talking about the garden, he attempts to make it concrete and verifiable, two things that the dreamlike and elusive garden can never be. Just as he cannot bring certain features of the garden out into the real world, he cannot bring the real world—either his schoolmates or the rules of concrete reality—into the garden. Once again, Wallace’s preoccupation with the garden prevents him from full and concentrated attention in his real life. His grades suffer because of his melancholy over his second loss of the garden, and it is not until his material ambitions again motivate him that he can refocus on his real life.
Themes
