The Whalestoe Letters

On Broken Minds

Cover of The Whalestoe Letters

The Whalestoe Letters is a small part of the much larger book House of Leaves, later republished as its own epistolary with some additional content. The Whalestoe Letters consists of a series of letters written to the protagonist of House of Leaves, Johnny Truant, from his mother Pelafina “P” Lievre during her stay at The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute.

Much like House of Leaves, The Whalestoe Letters starts off relatively normal before slowly unfolding into something both unique and hard to describe. The words themselves wrap around the page, no longer following any sort of order, requiring the reader to turn the book around at all kinds of angles and piece together each section to form a coherent message. However this is not simply for show, and is always done with a specific purpose. In House of Leaves, it is used to represent the decaying mind of one character and another character’s descent into the titular house. And in The Whalestoe Letters, it is used to represent the mind of Pelafina, the author of the very letters whose mangled words the reader is left to reassemble. All-in-all, The Whalestoe Letters and House of Leaves are both very good at what they do, and what seems like a simple random gimmick becomes a centerpiece for a carefully crafted piece of art.

Yet there’s a reason I chose to use The Whalestoe Letters and no House of Leaves for this article and that is because of the former’s plot. Both stories are very good at using unreliable narration, but The Whalestoe Letters plot specifically intrigues me in a strange way, more than House of Leaves did. Don’t get me wrong, I loved every second of House of Leaves, and I would vote it as having the better plot overall, but the shortness of The Whalestoe Letters and the fact that we are only given one narrator to rely on presents a mystery and a message I wanted to discuss. Of course I can’t quite discuss it without getting into spoilers, so here is your warning:

SPOILERS AHEAD

From the letters Pelafina gives us, a few main events happen over the course of the story. The first is that part way through Pelafina’s stay, the director leaves and a new one is hired, causing a noticeable shift in the way Pelafina writes. She starts shortening her name to P. and begins expressing worry because of how long it's been since Johnny has spoken to her. She eventually writes a letter claiming that something terrible is going on, but her letters are being monitored so she needs to encode her next message and hope that Johnny can decode it. The message we see is much much longer than any previously, and it initially reads as rambling nonsense that almost sounds like it’s saying something. But by taking the first letter of each word, you eventually piece together a horrifying message.

“They have found a way to break me. Rape a fiftysix year old bag of bones. There is no worse and don’t believe otherwise… You must save me Johnny. In the name of your father. I must escape this place or I will die” This is not the whole message, but this will give you the gist. There’s a cleverness to the way this message is conveyed. It isn’t simply spelled out for you like any other novel. You work through the message, letter by letter, piecing every little bit together yourself. In that way, the message at the end should feel like a reward, and yet the moment you’ve put together those first two sentences, you can already tell that this is nothing to celebrate. By making the reader solve the message this way, it makes it far more emotionally investing, by making the reader work towards this message, it makes them feel involved in uncovering something so horrible.

As the letters continue, Pelafina’s mind takes a noticeable turn for the worse. As I described before, the words begin running up the sides of the page, turning and braking as her messages grow more and more unsteady, words and phrases become repeated over and over again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.” Amidst the chaos, we learn why she was sent to Whalestoe in the first place, and it all becomes overwhelming, her broken mind laid bare before the reader.

And then, it stops. Pelafina says she has no memory of the past few months, and that the director never really left. In the end she claims that all of it had simply never happened. And yet, we still have the letters from her, so clearly there is something else going on. There are several different theories that you can construct from this, but I think they largely fall into two categories, the first where you believe what Pelafina said during that time, and the second where you believe what she said afterward. There is a third option of not believing anything she said, but it’s much harder to craft a theory based purely on what you know is false than it is knowing something that’s true. I would strongly recommend you read The Whalestoe Letters for yourself (And House of Leaves) and formulate your own theory regarding the issue, but I shall present my own if you're curious.

In regards to the former option (believing Pelafina about the director change), it is entirely possible that a new director was hired and that during his time there began torturing the patients. It is an unfortunate reality that such events have occurred at mental institutes and insane asylums in real life. During this time, Pelafina would not have taken it well, and the mental breakdown that comes through her letters becomes a much more reasonable response to her mistreatment at the hands of the new director. But then, the original director suddenly comes back. After public attention came to the institute’s mishandling of its wards, sufficient media attention would have gotten that director fired and arrested for their crimes, and it wouldn’t be unlikely for the original director to simply come back and retake the position. It’s clear that Pelafina is getting the care she needs again, and it’s possible that necessitates forgetting what happened to her.

In regards to the second option (Not believing Pelafina), it’s simply possible that for one reason or another Pelafina stopped being receptive to her treatment and began going through a really bad episode. She did really write those letters, and probably believed what she was writing at the time, but truly does not remember any of it, and it probably wouldn’t help her if she did.

We ultimately can’t be entirely sure of what really happened at The Whalestoe Institute, yet what doesn't change are the letters we have from Pelafina. Regardless of whether the events she described were real, the pain she felt from them was. At the end of the day, The Whalestoe Letters gives us a glimpse into the broken mind of someone who is suffering, with a lot of uncertainty surrounding what really happened during that time, it’s reflective of Pelafina’s own mindset. At the end of the book, Pelafina herself is uncertain about the events of the last few months and that uncertainty is integral to what she’s going through. By making her the sole narrator, we’re afforded a glimpse into what that uncertainty and pain, and are ourselves left uncertain, only able to theorize about what really happened.

END OF SPOILERS