Generally speaking—very generally—a work of fiction which has at it narrative center a mystery such as the disappearance of a character asks the question popularly shorted to whodunit? It can be assumed the person who has disappeared has been murdered if they never show up again and a number of suspects will be marked as potentially responsible for the mystery is ultimately solved. In this type of story, the solution and revelation of the genuine culprit can and usually does say something about the psychology of the writer. The writer, after all, is the person who decided whom the guilty part would be as well as their motivation.
In the Lake of the Woods features a mysterious disappearance at the center of its narrative capable of providing some clues into the psychological of the author, Tim O’Brien, but it is not the identity of the person responsible which is useful for such a psychological profile. It is never made entirely clear either exactly what happened to Kathy Wade and whether her husband was responsible in any way for disappeared and, for some readers, presumed murder. Even the fact that she may not be dead at all much less murdered remains a mystery. This is one of those novels with an ending that drives some readers to toss the book across the room when they finish. All the effort reading about a mystery and you don’t even get the simple answer of what really happened to Kathy.
That part of the story is left up to each reader to decide based on the evidence and indications provided by the author. And the fact is that it could go a number of different ways, including even the possibility that one day in the future Kathy and her husband reunite to live out the rest of their lives in told privacy from the rest of the world. Or, then again, maybe he murdered her in cold blood. Or, perhaps he killed her, but simply doesn’t remember as a result of his fragile mental and emotional state. Lots of potential solutions exist that each contain at least some kernel of genuine possibility.
And it within this sphere of the possibility that reading such a work of fiction shifts the psychological profiling from the author to the reader. In a way, those stories which present a complex web of possible solutions to an unsolved mystery driving the narrative are literature’s equivalent of the Rorschach inkblot famously used by psychologists to determine certain personality characteristics. Even if you’ve never actually seen them, you know of them: strangely formed smudges of ink on a card which the patient is then encouraged to examine and express in terms of what they can see in the figures. Among the popular responses to individual inkblots are things like bats, demons, humans in profile, butterflies and skulls. Exactly how much a trained psychologist can determine about a complete stranger’s personality is up for debate and source for contentious argument, but the real point is the test has become so pervasive and familiar that it has taken on the perception of probably being at least somewhat accurate.
Common sense suggests that a far more dependable means of doing the same thing would be to hand patients a book like In the Lake of the Woods or other novel or story or film that ends ambiguously with the mystery unsolved and several possible outcomes indicated as being every bit as likely as the other. The writer who decides that Character X is the person who killed Character Y because of motivation Z rather than Character A killing Character Y because Motivation B is letting the reader gain insight into his working personality. Force the reader to make the determination of whether John murdered Kathy and knows it or murdered Kathy but can’t remember or accidentally killed Kathy but consciously covered up or has been in cahoots with her and is simply biding his time until he can join her on some isolated beach in the Pacific and what you’ve got there is surely as telling a piece of psychological insight into that reader’s personality as anything that can be gleaned from whether he sees a the wings of a bath or the wings of a moth.
