The door in the wall symbolizes an alternative path to Wallace’s career-focused and successful but ultimately discontented life. The door first appears to Wallace early in his life, as he is being shaped by his father’s old-fashioned plans for him. That first time, he is able to step through the door and experience an alternative childhood of love, play, and collaboration different from his father’s rules and expectations of success. When he is even just a bit older, however, in his school days, his obligations and aspirations prevent him from taking the alternative path to the garden of peace and contentment. Instead, he chooses to ignore the door in favor of getting to school on time, the rigor of academics, and the pressures of competing with his classmates.
The door then appears to him multiple times during important career moments in Wallace’s life, offering him a choice between the path he is on and another path which leads him away from material success but into happiness and contentment. He knows, when it appears, that the door is unlocked and that the people in the garden are waiting for him and glad to see him. The possibility of that alternative life haunts him throughout his scholastic and political career, but he never chooses to take the final step and open the door that would cut him off from his career. He feels a draw to the door, but he is also drawn by responsibility, expectations, and his own ambition towards his political career. In this way, the door also comes to symbolize the incompatibility of life in this world—a life of striving for success—and the life of perfect contentment beyond the door. One or the other may be possible, the story seems to say, but no one can have both at once.
Upon reaching middle age, however, he feels that he has over and over again made the wrong choice and taken the wrong path. At the end of the story, he so longs for that alternative path that he mistakes another door—one leading to his death—for the door in the wall which he believes would have led to his fulfillment. The story never answers the ultimate question of whether that quest for fulfillment led to Wallace’s awful and ridiculous death in a pit, or if in stepping through that final door and to his death he in fact did escape his material life and regained the perfect contentment of the garden. By withholding that answer, the story turns the door into a symbol for the unknowability of whether some kind of heaven exists—an acknowledgement that the only way to learn that answer is to die.
The Door in the Wall Quotes in The Door in the Wall
Then very haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily, he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in his life, the haunting memory of a beauty and a happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings, that made all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him.
As his memory of that childish experience ran, he did at the very first sight of that door experience a peculiar emotion, an attraction, a desire to get to the door and open it and walk in. And at the same time he had the clearest conviction that either it was unwise or it was wrong of him— he could not tell which—to yield to this attraction. He insisted upon it as a curious thing that he knew from the very beginning—unless memory has played him the queerest trick— that the door was unfastened, and that he could go in as he chose. (…) And it was very clear in his mind, too, though why it should be so was never explained, that his father would be very angry if he went in through that door.
I suppose my second experience with the green door marks the world of difference there is between the busy life of a schoolboy and the infinite leisure of a child. Anyhow, this second time I didn’t for a moment think of going in straight away. You see—for one thing, my mind was full of the idea of getting to school in time— set on not breaking my record for punctuality. I must surely have felt some little desire at least to try the door—yes, I must have felt that... But I seem to remember the attraction of the door mainly as another obstacle to my overmastering determination to get to school.
‘If 1 had stopped,’ I thought, ‘I should have missed my scholarship, I should have missed Oxford— muddled all the fine career before me! I begin to see things better!’ I fell musing deeply, but I did not doubt then this career of mine was a thing that merited sacrifice.
If ever that door offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in, out of this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome futilities. I will go and never return. This time I will stay... I swore it, and when the time came—I didn't go.
And then did the pale electric lights near the station cheat the rough planking into a semblance of white? Did that fatal unfastened door awaken some memory?
Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?
There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination. We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger, and death.
But did he see like that?
The Door in the Wall Symbol Timeline in The Door in the Wall
