GENRE
Science-Fiction and Fantasy
THEMES
SETTING
A time travel
story
Multiple Places and
Times
Majority of the story
takes place at Bogg's End
in Memory, Minnesota on Lake Pepin
BOGG'S
END
Bogg's End is a huge, old house built in the 1800's on a bluff above Lake Pepin
Oringinally built by Pinky Boggs for his family.
The Boggs Family
"disappeared" in
1927
Jack's grandparents bought
Bogg's End in the late
1940's
Jack's mother lived in
Bogg's End from
1952-1970's
Jack's Grandma Skoro
"disappeared" from Bogg's
End in 1981
Jack and his mother, Betty, return to Bogg's End in the 1990's
Jack Lund "disappears"
from Bogg's end in the
1990's
CAST OF
CHARACTERS
Narrator
Jack Lund,
(aka Mr. Was)
a teenager living with an alcoholic father. A good day for Jack is when his father is too drunk to beat his mother. After witnessing his mother's death, Jack runs away from Bogg's End using a secret, time-travel door. He flees 50 years into the past to the 1940's in Memory, Minnesota. Jack plans to live through the past and grow up and prevent his mother's murder.
Other main
characters
Grandpa Skoro
a bitter and cruel old
man. He is wealthy. He dies at the beginning of the story. His
death brings Jack and his family to Bogg's End in Memory,
Minnesota
Grandma Skoro
disappeared in 1981,
two years after Jack was born. Grandpa Skoro became even meaner
after she disappears.
Elizabeth (Betty)
Lund
Jack's mother, she is
abused by her alcoholic husband and ignored by her
father.
Ronald
(Ron) Lund
Jack's father. He is an alcoholic. He is a good husband and father when he is sober. He is cruel and violent when he is drinking.
Old Man Murphy
A farmer in Memory. Jack
lives and works on his
farm in the 1940's.
Andie Murphy
Old Man Murphy's daughter. Jack has a crush on her. She is kind and fun with beautiful red hair and green eyes.
Franklin (Scud) Scudder
Jack's friend in the 1940's. He is a hustler and a scam artist. He is in love with Andie and very jealous and possesive. Jack and Scud serve together during WWII on Gaudalcanal in the Pacific Ocean.
Pincus Q. (Pinky) Boggs
A very wealthy man that
built Bogg's End in the
1800's. He installed the time travel door, but regrets that he ever
built the door.
TOPICS
· Family (dysfunctional)
· Time Travel
· Alcoholism
· Fate and Destiny
· Spousal Abuse
· Love, Friendship, and Loyalty
Author's Note
Pete Hautman
explains how and why he wrote the
novel.
He states
"Jack
Lund's story" was discovered in 1952 in an aluminum briefcase that
contained 4 notebooks.
Pete
researched and
investigated Jack's story and Pete Hautman is "convinced the events
described in Jack's notebooks actually
occured".
The First Notebook “The Door”
Written by an older man Dated 1952
Tells the story of Jack Lund’s life from 1993-1996 in Memory, Minnesota
Jack is 13-17 years old
Jack time travels to 1941
The notebook ends on December 7, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor
The Second Notebook “The Canal”
This chapter is called “The Canal” because Jack is a Marine fighting on Guadalcanal during WWII.
The notebook was found by a Japanese soldier on Guadalcanal during WWII
Letters from Jack to Andie
A secret is revealed, Jack and Andie are developing feeling for each other
Scud tries to kill Jack
Jack and a dead soldier are left in a cave with a machine gun and the Japanese are attacking.
MEETING MY
GRANDFATHER pages
6-11
It is February 17,
1993 in Skokie, Illinois where a 13 year old Jack Lund lives with
his mother and
father.
Jack's mother gets
a phone call at midnight that her father, "Skoro", is in the
hospital dying.
The reader learns
that Jack's father drinks a lot of beer and hates
Skoro.
The reader learns
"Your grandfather is a cheap, mean,
hard-hearted old miser"
(7).
Jack states
"My grandmother had disappeared about
twoyears after I was born. some people say she left on her own,
other believed something terrible happened to her. It was a long
time ago. My dad said she was probably dead. My mother didn't like
to talk about it"
(9).
Jack and his mother
drive through the night to the
hospital.
Jack sees grandfather Skoro for the first time in years. Skoro has a long, pink scar running along his jaw line.
His grandfather
tries to strangle Jack to
death.
" 'You!"
I don't remember how he got his hands
around my neck, but I remember not being able to breathe, his
thumbs sinking deep into my neck...his wet lips writhing, saying,
'Kill you. Kill you. Kill you again' "
(11).
Skoro has a heart
attack and "The monitor displayed a
flat green line, howling its mechanical grief"
(11).
MEMORY
pages 12-18
Jack and his mother drive to Memory, Minnesota. A dying, delapitated town on Lake Pepin, population 40.
When Jack sees the welcome sign for Memory
he
sarcastically says, "I suppose now
they'll have to make it thirty-nine"
(12).
Jack learns:
In the 1940's Memory was a vital town with
1,000
residents, a rail station, a bank and insurance company that
tourists visited because of Lake
Pepin.
When Jack's mother was a girl about 300
people
living in Memory.
In the 1990's all the businesses are
abandoned
and boarded up. There is not even a bank or gas
station.
The old rail station in now called "The
Memory
Institute" a kind of museum for the
town.
The only businesses in town are a post
office and
Ole's Quick Stop "a sort of grocery store/video
rental/bar/cafe/bait shop".
When Jack is playing pinball at Ole's, he learns:
His grandfather lived at Bogg's End, a
huge, old,
scary house on the river bluff above
Memory.
Jack states, "The
longer I looked at that house, the more it looked to me like a big
gray toad" (18).
Bogg's End is named after old man Boggs
who built
the place, lived there with his wife and two daughters, but
disappeared in 1927.
Skoro bought Bogg's End in the
forties.
His grandmother disappeared from Bogg's
End in
1981.
BOGG'S END pages
19-24
Jack and
his mother drive to Skoro's house to spend the
night.
When Jack call's the house Bogg's End, his
mother says, "Don't call it that. I hate that"
(20).
The house has 6 bedrooms, each a different
color.
Jack chooses to sleep in the yellow room,
"because it was the farthest away
from Skoro's bedroom" and learns from his mother,
"That was my room when I was a little
girl" (22-23).
During the night Jack wakes up and goes to
the
closet. He finds "the oddly-shaped
door at the far end of the closet...The knob, a tarnished brass
with an ornate raised design, was located higher than you would
expect. I had a sense of dejavu, a feeling that I'd been there
before, and that I had opended the door"
(23).
Jack tries to open the door but hits
something
sold and invisible. He hits the surface with his fists and WAKES
UP.
He steps back into the bedroom and assumes
he has
been sleepwalking for the first time in his
life.
When Jack looks back in the closet he
"examined both ends of the closet.
Walls, plain and unadorned. There was no door"
(24).
THE FUNERAL
pages 25-33
Jack's
father arrives at Bogg's End for the funeral. He is in a good mood
and has "a case of beer in a cooler.
Or anyway, what was lefty of a case a beer. He'd managed to drink a
lot of it on the drive up from Skokie"
(25).
Jack's father seems
excited about the inheritance he is expecting to receive now the
Granpa Skoro is dead.
Jack's parents meet
with Skoro's lawyer.
They find out that
Skoro left all his money to The Memory Institute. (2 million
dollars).
"Your grandfather screwed us again. He
left every
last dimt to some dump called the Memory Institute"
(28).
Skoro left the house
and its contents to his daughter.
There is tension
between Jack's parents.
"watched her make dinner. Porl chops,
Dad's
favorite, with rice and lima beans, which he hated. Mom would do
that sort of thing, and I never understood it. It was as if she
played with his anger, like she wanted things to be bad. Everybody
thinks their parents are screwed up, but mine should've won some
kind of prize" (29).
Jack explores Bogg's End and realizes Skoro did not have a TV or a radio.
Skoro's library is
filled with books about the stock market and World War
II.
Skoro does have a PC.
When Jack and his father try to see what is on his grandfather's
computer a mysterious message appears, What goes around comes
around.
The computer catches on
fire and dies.
At Skoro's funeral
hears someone mumbling What goes around comes around, but when he
turns to look there is no one sitting behind
him.
"I
turned around to look at him. There was no one sitting behind me.
The pew was empty. But I could still hear the words, echoing in my
brain: what goes around comes around what goes around comes around
what goes" (33).
THE METAL DOOR pages
34-41
After
the funeral Jack's father explores Bogg's End, basically taking an
inventory of what they can sell for
money.
Jack and his father
discover the third floor of
the house is filled with junk and old
furniture.
Jack's parents discuss and old man they saw at the funeral.
"I thought that one
old guy was going to die right in the chapel. You see him? With the
patch on his eye?...He looked like he'd been in an accident...He
looked like his face met up with a lawn mower is what he looked
like" (36).
Jack did not SEE this
man.
Later that night, Jack's
parents are arguing
again, so Jack goes the third floor of Bogg's end to escape their
yelling.
Jack explores the third
floor and finds the door
from his dreams in a closet.
“The door was right in front of me…I felt for the knob…Feeling its surface, I discovered a board had been nailed across it. Someone, sometime, had not wanted this door to be found, or to be used” (40).
Jack opens the door and
walks down a darkened
staircase.
Jack ends up outside of
Bogg's End, but it is no
longer a cold winter, it is a beautiful moonlit night in the summer
and the house is surrounded by weeds and looks
abandoned.
“It was Bogg’s End all right, but it had changed. The paint was flaking off the sides, the windows, were boarded up, the grounds were overgrown with weeds, and I knew, without knowing how I knew, that no one was home” (41).
SCUD AND ANDIE pages
42-47
Jack is very confused. He
wonders if he has somehow traveled to the
future.
"Had I stepped into the future? If so, how
many years had passed?" (42)
" I also wanted to know where--or when I was"
(43).
Jack explores and walks down the driveway
of
Bogg's End and meets a boy about his
age.
Jack learns from the boy that no one has
lived
at Bogg's End since the Bogges
disappeared.
The boy asks Jack, "I bet you
run away from someplace, didn't you? I
ran away a couple of times. One time I got all the way to
Minneapolis. Where'd you run away from?"
(42).
Jack meets a boy and girl named Scud and
Andie.
The three of them sneak into a apple
orchard
to steal apples.
Scud plays a trick on Jack and he gets
chased
by a dog.
Jack loses Scud and Andie as he is running from
the dog. He is very angry. He looks for Scud and Andie, but returns
to Bogg's End before he finds
them.
Jack spent about an hour with Scud and
Andie
and misplaced the real world in his
mind.
"I hadn't thought at all about Bogg's End,
or
the door, or the fact that in the real world--if that's what it
was--snow lay three feet deep over the land. I'd forgotten all of
that. Actually, it wasn't so much that I'd forgotten, it was that I
had somehow misplaced it in my mind" (47).
He is worried about the door working in both directions.
"I wanted to go
back. But would the door work in both directions? Would passing
back through that doorway return me to the Memory I remembered?"
(47).
SOME OF THE WORST
DAYS OF MY LIFE pages
48-54
Jack
returns to Bogg's End and goes to
sleep.
The
next morning he is sure that the door and the stairs and his time
with Andie and Scud were
real.
He is
sure that it was real because he has found an apple on his
nightstand.
"The door worked
both ways...I asked myself, Is it real? ...An apple, red streaked
with gold, perched on the nightstand. I picked it up, felt its
roundness, took a bite. Sweet, tart juices flooded my mouth. It had
been real, all right"
(48).
Jack's parents have had another fight and his
mother has a big bruise on her
cheek.
Jack goes outside to look for the door before he leaves.
"There was
definitely no door. Instead, its squat shape was defined by a patch
of siding that did not quite match the original clapboard"
(49).
Jack's family returns to Skokie and his father
has a terrible car accident. This causes his father to go to AA and
for the first time life is good for the
family.
"We had two good
years. Sometimes I sit and try to figure out which was the best
dayof my life. I haven't had a lot of good ones, but some of the
best must have been those years in Skokie when Dad was staying
sober" (51).
Jack's mother gets a job so she can pay the taxes on Bogg's End.
The family does not discuss the house, but every couple of months Jack's mom takes a ride to Bogg's End to check on the house.
Jack
puts Bogg's End out of his
mind.
"I thought about
the dorr at times, but as the months and years passed the memories
seemed more like a dream. Bogg's End coud rot away, and that was
fine with me. I never wanted to see the place again"
(51).
In
April 1995, when Jack is in 10th grade (2 years after Grandpa's
Skoro's funeral) Jack's father starts drinking
again.
Several months later, Jack's father has lost
his job and his parents argue about Bogg's
End.
This time Jack's father
hits his mother and Jack.
They both end up bruised and bloody on the kitchen
floor.
"Maybe that was the
worst day of my life. So far"
(54).
GOING BACK TO
BOGG'S
END pages
55-59
Jack and his mother are taken to the
hospital and
his father goes to
jail.
While Jack's father is in jail, his mother
packs
up and tells Jack "We're going to
Memory" (page
55).
Jack and his mother move into Bogg's End at
the
end of July, a few days before his 16th
birthday.
Jack does not want to live there, but his
mother
does not care she just wants to get away from her
husband.
There are no kids in Memory who are Jack's
age,
but he does get to know his mother better and learn about his
grandparents from
her.
About Betty's
father:
"Daddy was
rich, so
all the kids wanted to be friends with me...The stock market. He
alwasy seemed to know which companies were ging to do well, and
he
invested in them...he never worked a day in his life. I think
people though he was some sort of criminal. But people liked my
mother"
(56).
About Betty's
mother:
"Feisty,
nobody
pushed her around...Daddy tried to push her around, but she
wouldn't have it...I should have been more like her...I think
she
might have just plain run off. I think she must have died
somehow,
because why else would I never hear from her?"
(57).
Jack does not think about the door. He
pushes the
memories
away.
"The fact is I
was
scared. I was scared it had been real, and I was scared that
maybe
it had not"
(58).
Jack and his mother talk about silly dreams,
but
she asks Jack if he has "ever dreamed
about doors. I could feel all the little hairs on my neck go
straight up. 'What do you mean?' I said. 'Oh I don't know...it's
just...I used to dream about door when I was your age...I
remember
one dream, it was so vivid I thought it was real. One summer, I
was
about eight years old...I went through a door in one of the
closets
upstairs...A few days later, Daddy made me show him the door I'd
gone through. I took him to the closet and we looked in and
there
was no door where I remembered. There was nothing but a wall"
(59).
That afternoon Jack's mother, Betty, goes to
Lake
City to look for a
job.
Jack makes a peanut butter sandwich, wraps it up in a newspaper and "climbed the stairs to the third floor, feeling a little foolish, still half convinced that the door had been nothing but a dream" (59).