The House at the End of the World

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses child sexual abuse and murder.

Throughout The House at the End of the World, Katie seeks answers to explain the problem of evil, only to discover that her search is misguided and that seeking beauty instead will give her life meaning. Early in the novel, she turns to authors like Dickens, Austen, and Dostoevsky, feeling drawn to work that shows compassion and avoids nihilism. Du Maurier, she finds, expresses “sympathy for the suffering of others but avoids sentimentality” (27), requiring instead a kind of compassion that is “demanding” and that “[does] something.” For Katie, there is meaning in taking action inspired by beauty.

Katie’s own attempts to take action disappoint her, however. After her family is murdered and her attempts to get justice are met with threats, she turns to her painting to castigate evil. She repeatedly tries to “convey the truth […] the meaning, the horror” of the scene of her family’s murder (45). Each time, she feels unhappy with the results and destroys them. They don’t adequately symbolize the “condition of [the] souls” of the men who killed her daughters (161). Part of Katie’s struggle is that she wants to understand why evil happens.