House of Leaves/Headscratchers

• How does Navidson get the Holloway Tape? Some of the scenes in it weren't recorded until Holloway was seperated from the group and died. There's no way anybody would've stopped to look for it, since their priority was getting out of the maze before they ran out of supplies.
  • It's possible the House preserved the camera and Navidson's team found it on their way to escape.
  • It's actually mentioned in the book. Navidson was going up the staircase, and was thinking, "Where's Holloway's stuff?" Lo and behold, the House produced it for him.
• Why does the house go batshit insane and try to kill them? I understand why the Labyrinth would try something like that- it's the embodiment of true, endless nothingness, "things" make it sick- but why would the house do that? Rule of Scary doesn't apply when the book is as pretentious as this.
  • Wasn't Tom taunting it (or the 'monster') to get him when he was camping out near the staircase? Maybe the house decided to take up his offer since the Labyrinth didn't.
    • I thought the purpose of the Labyrinth was to test people's souls or somesuch by surrounding them with true nothingness until they were stripped to their truest form. Holloway was, at heart, rotten and executed for it, while Navidson's love was at the center of his being, so he was spared. The house just exists to draw people to the Labyrinth. Presumably, it doesn't like people leaving before they've been judged. I think.
    • So it went insane because Navidson wasn't judged yet? From what I remember, while trying to escape the Labryinth, Navidson was dragged down with the increasing staircase. Then everyone tries to rescue him until he suddenly comes back, and that's when it started going crazy (if my memory is correct). And then Navidson decides to go back to conquer it, etc.
    • It's implied at one point that absorbing Holloway changed the house, somehow.
      • In which case, absorbing Tom might've changed it again, but made it less malignant rather than more so.
  • Possibly the house was always part of the labyrinth, just the most stable and human-tolerant part. It could've gone berserk at any time, it just hadn't done so up to then.
• What would happen if you put a pile of matter (such as bricks, or a huge block of wood) against the outside wall, then sent a non-sentient creature into the hallway? Would it skip over to the nearest open atmosphere, or would it Tele Frag? The house seems to treat the hallway as an open door, where humans go to a place that is in the three or four dimensions we know the yard, while animals go to exacty the same place only being the yard itself, so would the house consider the material part of itself and extend the depth of the "door", or... yeah.
  • If I'm reading your question right, I think it'd either just let them go through, with the wall behind them and material in front of them (so they'd have to push it out of their way when they go through) or your open atmosphere theory.
• How should I explain this...What would happen if you remove the wall that has the entrance to the hallway? Either from the outside or the inside. what would there be where there's supposed to be the entrance of the hallway? Or the wall that's 1/4 inch larger on the inside. It would be 32'9.75 right outside and then you go in and then...?
  • You think that's a puzzler? What would happen if you detached that section of wall from the living room, rotated it 180 degrees, and then inserted it back into the wall again? Would the hallway still be there? Would it lead away from the Great Hall instead of towards it? How about if you moved it into the bedroom and attached it so that it fed into the first cross-passage?
    • Now you're thinking with portals!
  • I know how you feel: my first move upon discovering the "5 1/2 Minute Hallway" would've been to station an observer inside the house, staring into the hallway, while I went into the yard, to the wall that comprised its "other side." Bring out Mister Drill, bore an inch-wide hole into the wall, and look through it. Will I see my friend? What'll HE see? Try pushing things through the hole. Shoot my water gun into it. Widen hole. Etc.
  • One experiment Navidson should have done: 1. Take one of his fancy cameras and point it at the outside wall. 2. Chase one of the pets into the hallway. 3. Watch the tape and find out what just happened! (Did the animal simply rematerialize at the other side, or come out of a hole that suddenly appeared, or what?)
• It bugs me that Danielewski draws attention to the concept of the Minotaur by crossing it out and making it red. Because by doing so he makes such a concept more important than other possibilities. And then it becomes harder to imagine the whole labyrinth as nothing more than a modern version of the Labyrinth of Crete, even though someone says it's not really that. Or maybe I shouldn't have read the fourth Percy Jackson book right before this one.
• Johnny Truant annoyed the crap out of me. I want to read a creepy mindbender, not a bunch of badly-written stream-of-consciousness. The footnotes could have added a whole new dimension to the story as they were clearly intended to do, if they hadn't been so melodramatic and "gritty". The worst part was Johnny describing his friends helping him get clean and then laughing at me as though I'D ACTUALLY BELIEVED IT! I'm not stupid and frankly you are a transparent, predictable excuse for a character. Fortunately, one can skip everything in Courier and not be worse off as far as the actually story goes. (That said, I thought all the other "extras", like his mother's letters, were awesome). Sorry to be so grouchy, but it just REALLY bugged me.
  • Yeah, Johnny bothered me a lot, too. His writing annoyed me so much that I skipped his parts of the book the first time I read it. Then I realized that his writing style is a big part of his characterization, and adds to his plot quite a bit; since then I've found his Word Salad tendencies and constant lying more interesting than irritating. I like his parts of the book now but I can totally see where you're coming from.
  • In the beginning, I thought that Johhny's narration added another layer to explain what is going on, but as the book wore on, his footnotes became increasingly erratic, bordering on complete non sequitor. I'd pick through them to try to find how in the hell they relate to the original text, which was far more interesting than what Johnny had to say. You can say that it exhibits Johnny's loss of sanity, but overall, it was distracting, a waste of space, and in the end, I didn't really give a crap that he was going insane because it had no bearing on the real story.
    • It did have bearing on the real story. One of the underlying themes of House of Leaves was obsession, and one of the ideas that Johnny's character exemplified and suggested was that finding the book House of Leaves would drive you insane. This is not for you, after all.
• Why, exactly, is it called "House of Leaves"?
  • "Leaves" is a word often meaning "pages". The book itself is a "house of leaves".
  • I don't think there's really a concrete answer unless you ask the author himself. There's many theories, like one about how leaves changing during seasons symbolizes the house changed, and another about it relating to Yggdrasil.
  • See also the last "Untitled Fragment" at the end of Appendix F.
• I have searched everywhere without finding an answer, and I believe now that only my fellow Tropers can give me one: How far did Navidson's freaking coin fall down the shaft? I simply don't have the competence at physics to work it out for myself and it's been bugging the hell out of me. All I know is that Zampanó forgot to factor in terminal velocity.
  • I'm not a mathematician, but according to the formula of terminal velocity and my guessed area and weight of the coin, it fell approximately 366 kilometers (or 227 miles). Very far, yes, but not even close to the radius of the Earth.
    • Accounting for air resistance, estimates I've seen usually hover around 5-7 miles, certainly no more than the earlier given figure of 13 miles. As I noted on the page, Zampano's version would have it hit the ground at 86 times the speed of sound with the energy of a stick of dynamite.
• Not so much a complaint as a question, how did Johnny end up? It seemed like he was on his way to a happier life (albeit as a hobo) but then his footnotes end with him running from his beating of Gdansk man (which presumably happened much earlier), a musing on his mother, burning his copy of the book, and then the story about the baby. So is he better now or not?
  • Welcome to the Gainax Ending, my friend. It's been ten years and we still only have theories.
  • You might want to pay attention to the dates that are on the journal entries...
    • Just so I can assure myself and not go insane, "It's going to be alright," right? RIGHT?