Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Lathe of Heaven, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Limits of Utilitarianism
Dreams and the Limitations of Knowledge
Cosmic Balance
Power and Selfishness
Summary
Analysis
As Orr tries to make his way through the suburbs to his flat that night, an Aldebaranian Alien stops him and invites him into its home. He asks if the Alien is Tiua’k Ennbe Ennbe, but the Alien replies that its name is E’nememen Asfah. Orr accompanies the Alien to its apartment by the river, where it suggests that Orr go to sleep in his bed. Orr admits that he’s tired. He’s done a lot today: he pressed a button. To this, the Alien remarks, “you have lived well.” Orr and the Alien say “er’ perrehnne” to each other, and Orr gives in to sleep. His dreams ebb and flow like waves in the middle of the ocean, “far from any shore,” and “changing nothing.” He sees sea turtles diving into the water.
Orr’s comment about pressing a button comically undermines the impact of the seemingly banal action, since pressing the button effectively saved the world from total collapse. Orr and Asfah’s exchange of the Alien term “Er’ perrehnne” unites them in a symbolic gesture of mutual empowerment that gives Orr the strength and centeredness he needs to glide effortlessly through his dreams. Orr’s dreams about sea turtles swimming “far from any shore” evokes the novel’s opening scene, in which a jellyfish swims effortlessly through an expansive sea. The sea turtles in Orr’s dream recapture the coherence and balance that the jellyfish lost when continents emerged from the depths of the sea and washed it ashore. That Orr’s final dream “chang[es] nothing” implies that he’s finally cured.
Themes
It’s early June, and the roses are in full bloom. Portland is getting back to normal after April’s chaos. Orr is at the Federal Asylum for the Insane, located north of Portland. The Asylum had been overcrowded in the immediate aftermath of what is now referred to as “The Break,” but things are mostly back to normal. An orderly brings Orr upstairs to the single rooms in the hospital’s north wing. There are locks on every door. The orderly explains to Orr that the patient is being isolated because the others are desperately afraid of him, though the man hardly ever moves. They reach the room, and the orderly unlocks the door to reveal Haber sitting on the bed, staring blankly ahead.
Haber’s blank stare reflects his blank interiority. Devoid of the external elements of power, control, and ambition he once relied on to shape his identity and give his life meaning, his ego wilts, his morals lose their meaning, and he collapses in on himself, much like the black hole he created with his effective nightmare.
Themes
Orr tries to speak to Haber, but his words fail him, and he feels a mixture of “excruciating pity, and fear” for Haber, who has lost his grip on reality. Orr knows that Haber is seeing the world after April 1998, looking at it “as misunderstood by the mind: the bad dream.” Orr thinks about a poem T.S. Eliot wrote, in which a bird talks of mankind’s inability to face reality; on the contrary, thinks Orr, it’s “unreality” that’s more difficult to confront.
Haber is now experiencing the existential dread Orr struggled to overcome after seeing the world end in April 1998. Witnessing his dream nearly destroy reality forces Haber to confront the tenuousness, uncertainty, and unknowability of reality. Haber’s brush with unreality destroys his previously held belief that rationality can eliminate all uncertainty: that no aspect of the world can evade humanity’s discerning, logical gaze. The T.S. Eliot poem Orr references is “Burnt Norton,” the first of four poems contained in Eliot’s work Four Quartets. The poem and The Lathe of Heaven explore similar ideas, such as the concept of universal balance, consciousness, and uncertainty. Orr’s observation about the difficulty of confronting “unreality” proposes a distinction between the difficulty of coming to terms with life’s unknowable and unpredictable qualities versus seeing unreality, knowing that life is meaningless, and figuring out how to find meaning anyway.
Themes
Orr takes a boat back to downtown Portland and heads back to work. He’d taken a long lunch break to visit Haber, but his employer, E’nememen Asfah, doesn’t care when he works so long as he finishes his work. Orr returns to the Kitchen Sink’s workshop and sits down in front of his drafting table. Asfah is in the showroom with the customers. Orr is one of three designers tasked with creating kitchenware. Ever since The Break, housewives flock to the store in search of appliances with which to furnish “the unexpected kitchens they found themselves cooking in that evening in April.”
Asfah is the Alien who offered Orr his apartment the night of The Break. As an employer, his casual approach to work schedules and lunch breaks reflects the Aliens’ broader commitment to natural balance; Asfah seems to have faith that Orr will complete the work he needs to finish without the unspontaneous, deliberate implementation of a strict work schedule to keep him in line. Orr’s comment about the housewives waking up in “the unexpected kitchens they found themselves cooking in that evening in April” refers to the new realities in which the housewives regained consciousness once Orr turned off the Augmentor and restored the world’s normalcy in the aftermath of Haber’s effective nightmare.
Themes
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Orr hears a voice that reminds him of his wife’s. He walks to the showroom and sees Asfah showing Heather an egg whisk. Her skin is brown again. Orr calls Heather by her name. Heather turns and recognizes him as George Orr, though she doesn’t know how she knows him. Orr tries to jog Heather’s memory by asking if she’s a lawyer. Heather shakes her head, explaining that she’s a legal secretary at Rutti and Goodhue. Orr lies, saying they must have run into each other there. He can’t tell what Heather recalls of the other continuums, and whether her memories will align with his own: after all, when they were married, Heather’s skin was gray, and she’d been “a far gentler person than this one,” who is “fierce” and assertive.
This new version of Heather is restored to the person she was when Orr first met her, rather than the gray, “far gentler person” she was when they were married. The fact that Heather is free to be herself in Orr’s restored version of reality illustrates the difference between Orr’s and Haber’s respective relationships to power. Whereas Haber derived his strength and power from ruling over others, Orr believes that power is only ethical if it is accessible to all and used sparingly.
Themes
Orr tells Heather that they’d actually had a date before The Break but never made it. He addresses her as “Miss Lelache.” Heather looks at Orr quizzically as she tells him her name is Andrews, not Lelache; Lelache was her maiden name, though she’s not married anymore, since her husband died in the war. Suddenly, she remembers how she knows Orr: he was the man who thought his dreams came true who wanted to get a new shrink.
Heather’s memories of Orr remain impersonal: she doesn’t appear to recall their romance. This is more proof of Orr’s commitment to free will and mutual empowerment; he could’ve dreamed of a world where Heather was his wife, but he chose not to, opting instead to let the universe lead them back to each other if such a reunion is meant to be.
Themes
Heather asks Orr what he ended up doing about his dream problem, and he tells her he just kept dreaming. She teases him about not being able to change the world into something better than “this mess.” Though Orr would also prefer a better world, he’s glad Heather exists in it; he’d grieved horribly for his missing wife in the aftermath of The Break. Now, though, Orr sees an end to his grieving, and hope for a future with this woman who is both strange and familiar to him. He invites Heather to grab a coffee with him at a nearby cafe, telling Asfah he’ll be back later. Asfah responds, “there is time. There are returns. To go is to return,” and he and Orr shake hands. Orr and Heather head out into a warm, misty summer day. Asfah watches them from behind the glass walls of his shop, “as a sea creature might watch from an aquarium.”
Orr’s hopeful outlook for the future conveys his newfound faith in universal balance. Uncertainty and powerlessness used to torment him, but this newfound faith reassures him that things will fall into place without forcing the issue. The water imagery at play in the description of Asfah watching Orr and Heather from behind the glass storefront “as a sea creature might watch from an aquarium” evokes the opening scene with the jellyfish swimming in the open sea. But whereas the jellyfish’s existence was threatened by continents that sprung from the water and swept the sea into a state of fragmented chaos, no such obstacles impede the balance and unity of Heather, Orr, and Asfah’s watery world: Orr and Heather walk from the watery environment of Asfah’s aquarium-like shop into the watery environment of the world outside, its air wet with mist. It’s a happy ending: though the future is uncertain, there is beauty to be found in simply experiencing existence, in gliding effortlessly through a balanced world.
Themes
