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
Redmond notes that he can still remember Wallace’s pallid and somber face, his words, and his tones from that after-dinner conversation. Meanwhile, the newspaper from the previous evening rests on Redmond’s sofa, containing the notice of Wallace’s death. At lunch, the club talked of nothing else. Wallace’s body was found the previous day in a deep pit that was part of a construction project for the extension of the railway. The construction site was blocked off from the public by a temporary boarded fence, accessible to workmen by a small doorway. The door had been left unlocked by mistake and Wallace had gone through it.
At this point, Redmond reveals why he is thinking of Wallace now, three months after their after-dinner conversation about the door in the wall. During that conversation, Wallace told Redmond that he wandered alone at night, grieving for the garden. It seems as though Wallace’s wandering—and his grief for the garden—led him to his death. Not only that, but as described here it is a rather ridiculous death, mistaking a temporary door in a construction fence for a magic door to a magic garden, and falling to death in a construction pit. At this point, it seems as if Wallace’s obsession with the garden has betrayed him to a pathetic death.
Themes
Redmond is consumed with questions, with the riddle of what happened. He pictures Wallace walking the streets at night, wrapped up in his thoughts. Redmond wonders: did the electric lights of the station make the rough planking of the construction fence look white? Redmond wonders further: was there any door in the wall at all? Did the makeshift door in the fence awaken some memory in Wallace’s memory? Then he asks a bigger question: was there ever actually any door in the wall at all? He is unsure. He has reported Wallace’s story as it was told to him.
Redmond returns again to his initial question of the reality of the door in the wall. It is clear to him that Wallace must have mistaken the door in the construction site for the magic door leading to the garden. This mistake seems to suggest that Wallace might have been mistaken other times, as well, and that the door in the wall might have been many different doors over the course of his life and the garden itself might indeed have simply been a dream. Redmond does not know; there is no true answer.
Themes
Redmond comments that there are times when he believes that Wallace was just the victim of a delusion or hallucination that led to an accident. Still, that is not his deepest belief. Redmond admits that others may think that he is superstitious and foolish, but he is more than half-convinced that Wallace had an abnormal gift. He believes that the door really did—in some way Redmond can’t understand—offer Wallace passage to a more beautiful world.
Despite the evidence that Wallace was fatally unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, Redmond admits that he believes the door in the wall was, in some sense, real. Redmond understands that others might think him foolish for his belief, or, like Wallace, unable to properly separate reality and fantasy. Still, he understands the question of the door’s reality not as one of evidence, but one of belief; Redmond has faith that Wallace had access to something beyond Redmond’s own understanding.
Themes
It may seem that, either way, the door betrayed Wallace in the end. But, Redmond asks, did it betray him? He notes that this question touches upon the mystery of dreamers and men of visions. Ordinary people see the common world: the planks of the temporary fence and the pit behind it. By the standards of ordinary people, Wallace walked into danger and death. But, Redmond asks, did Wallace see it like that?
An ordinary person might hear this story and think that, either way, Wallace dies because of his belief in the door. However, Redmond argues, people with access to some otherwise inaccessible reality or vision—such as access to a golden past—would see the situation differently because they see the entire world differently. Redmond classifies Wallace as one of these people: dreamers and visionaries who are fundamentally different from the rest of the world. Redmond, then, set up the question of the reality of the door in order to brush it aside. Here he attests that the question of the reality of the door in the wall is ultimately beside the point. Instead, Redmond argues that there is an unknowable truth to Wallace’s experiences, and that truth surpasses whether or not the door is real. While Wallace certainly stepped through that gate in the construction fence and fell to his death in a pit, Redmond raises the possibility here that in doing so, whether within his own mind or in some sort of heavenly reality, he did find his way back to the garden. And it is worth noting that like any such visionaries who ascend to some higher plane, Wallace has left behind himself a prophet to tell his story and bridge the gap between his garden and the real world: Redmond. Redmond then tells Wallace’s story, and leaves it up to the reader whether or not to have faith.
Themes
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