These notes include important information on the plot, characters, and themes of The Dream House by Craig Higginson. They are typed out and easy to read and will assist in grade 12 essay writing. (They helped in achieving a distinction for English in matric)
Novel is carried by numerous characters -Patricia, Looksmart, Beauty, Richard, Bheki, John Ford
- Each character has fresh perspective and insight
- Each introduces new level of complexity
- Each section presents a character’s point of view, each character is fighting their own battles
- Allows for reader to be actively deciding between what is right and wrong, just like what we do
in life
Themes:
Truth: Memory and truth
• Can be unattainable • Each person can experience the same thing
• Past events can be represented in many ways differently and can take a different meaning
and those representing them don’t have from it (because everyone is in a different
access to all the facts mental state)
• If truth can’t be found, how can reconciliation • The complete meaning of something will
begin? (confrontation between Patricia and never be available to us
Looksmart) • There is always an objective and subjective
• The process of discovery can be complicated truth
and difficult.
Past actions
• Poses question of whether people should be defined by their past actions
• It can either be argued that people should be defined by their actions as we can only prove
that we are what we say we are by doing things (e.g. acting kind and generous to prove you
are kind and generous)
• In contrast, the novel presents the idea that people can easily hide the intentions of their
actions, providing a false or unclear meaning of their action to those who witness it. e.g.
Patricia doesn’t want Grace to go to the hospital in her car and she never states why.
Looksmart interprets this as Patricia saying she doesn’t want Grace’s blood on her seats, which
isn’t what Patricia thinks she was intending at the time. As we do not know her motives, we
cannot interpret the action. The repressing of things we feel bad about - People often try and
forget their actions that made them feel guilty, however, the action will never go away and will
affect and come to define them in the future.
e.g. Richard has dementia and has forgotten his past actions (which has has also probably tried
to repress), but they come back to haunt him. He wants to dig up his dead child, which isn’t
actually the only child he had with Patricia, as well as the unborn child he had with Grace (who
died with Grace when he murdered her).
• At end of novel, Patricia learns so much more about Richard’s actions regarding Grace (and
more than Looksmart will ever know) and he is now defined by his actions.
• Patricia finally finds the resolve to get rid of Richard and send him to ‘a home.’
, Mysterious nature of the present: The relationship between the past and the
• Characters withhold information from other present
characters (creates dramatic irony) • Novel breaks down the division of the two
• The past can be seen as the present e.g.
Looksmart looks at the world through the
lens of the past
• Being knowledgable of the past in the
present can prevent repeating past mistakes
Burial and digging up (sub-theme from central Love and Hate:
theme of truth) • The relationship between love and hate
• Revealing and concealing; opening things up • Looksmart thinks he hates Patricia, but
to reveal a better perspective realises at the end of the novel that he loved
• The dog, the mist, the child’s and the dog’s her and, perhaps, in part, loves her still.
graves, the bloodwoods, the house itself • The truth of what each of these feelings
(which Looksmart intends on making an actually are sometimes seemingly
‘open-plan’) indistinguishable e.g. Grace and the dog are
locked together in a single image during the
dog attack and Looksmart describes it as
“my love and your fear”
• The relationship between love and hate
affects each of the characters in different
ways e.g. John Ford’s letter for Patricia
The home:
• The theme of finding one’s real or authentic home as opposed to the false home or homeland
one might reside in now
• More of a feeling than a physical place
• Each character dreams of the house in which they will one day live and no one is happy with
the house they are in now (it feels false and inadequate)
• Prominent theme- title of the novel
• Richard spends the whole novel trying to get back to a home in which he has never felt ‘at
home’.
• Patricia dreams about the house in which she grew up in Durban and she thinks she can return
to the person she once was before she moved to the farm with Richard. (dreams about
returning to an untroubled past)
• Patricia exiles Richard from her dream house by the sea.
• Beauty dreams about the house she will build when she retires, with its view of the
Drakensberg, and she has already secured a piece of land from the Chief.
• Looksmart returns to the nightmare house that he wants to transform and make ‘open plan’,
with a better view because he will cut down all the trees around it. He would also like to
reproduce this new house throughout the valley to try and stamp out the old house. However,
this dream will only be the original house reproduced with slight variations.
• Looksmart is too attached to his wound, and his sense of grievance, and he isn’t free from it.
• Looksmart is creating a ‘gated community’ for people fleeing the crime in the cities. He is not
creating a place beyond fear and fate, but reproducing it, albeit unconsciously.
• Looksmart will return to his family in Johannesburg more at peace with himself and possibly
able to be a better father and less conflicted, more faithful husband.
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