Kathy, Dreams of Happiness

“Later, when she said “Dream time”, maybe it was this she meant – an escape dream, a dream she would now enter”.

Why are the only sources of happiness in Kathy’s later life with John apparent only in her dreams?

Happiness is the state of being happy; felicity, fortune, joy, bliss. Initially, Kathy is content in their relationship. She has no ambitions; John is the only one with the aim “to be loved”, leading to his career in politics. Kathy, being the accepting woman she is, follows John. However, this leads to a life of discontent for her, as is revealed as the novel progresses. The suppression of Kathy and her role as a “political wifey” is in part, caused by John’s manipulation and control over his wife. She sees and acknowledges this, but attempts to live with it. This further leads to her fundamental dreams in life to be suppressed, cut off from her.

While her dreams of happiness was the only way she could cope with John and life, as numerous hypothesis chapters speculate, her now perpetual discontentment may have led to in an escape from it, resulting in her disappearance from Lake of the Woods.

John’s ambition to be a politician has a detrimental effect on their relationship, but Kathy selflessly accepts this, even though she knows she cannot be content as the wife of a politician. When John’s involvement in the My Lai massacre comes to light and the resulting ‘landslide’ occurs, she “never looked happier”. Her hate for politics is only revealed in her thoughts and to Tony Carbo, never to John. It was “deep, thick honest hate”; it had “taken away everything she most wanted”. She hates the attention, the routine, “the public eye”. For Kathy, what “she despised more than anything was what politics had done to their lives”. But she never reveals this; only during the investigation of Kathy’s disappearance does John’s confrontation with Pat leads to a revelation to him that Kathy “despised it all”. His delusional belief that they shared the same dreams is...