“So the bird inside Marek Marek had restless wings, fettered legs and terrified eyes. He assumed it was imprisoned inside him. Someone had incarcerated it there, though he hadn’t the faintest idea how that was possible. Sometimes, if he let his thoughts wander, he encountered its terrible gaze deep inside himself and heard a mournful, bestial lament.”

Marek Marek has depression and an alcohol dependency. He characterizes his pain as a bird, reflecting The Use of Folklore to Challenge Reality. Marek Marek characterizes himself as a victim of the bird, but also the bird as a victim itself. Their relationship is the inversion of symbiosis, with both suffering. The bird suffers from its confinement within Marek Marek, and Marek Marek suffers from the bird’s struggles to free itself, turning substance dependency and mental illness into both a literal and figurative form.

“Only when she awoke did she realize that she was on a journey; until then she had just been drifting around in space, casually changing location. Only sleep closes the old and opens the new—one person dies and another awakes.”

So much of House of Day, House of Night focuses on Borderlands as an Ontological Condition. While this most commonly manifests in the form of political, cultural, and emotional borders, the novel often branches out to address more unique ones. In this excerpt, sleep acts as a border between the days of a person’s life. It creates a divide between different periods of time, giving shape to time’s passage. It allows for self-reflection and a feeling of growth, with a new person waking each day.

“They are ashamed of you and will forget you. They will curse you and laugh at you. This miracle will fill them with dread. They will not believe that it comes from Him. Miracles are meant to be beautiful and sublime, to spread sweet odors and to shine with heavenly radiance, to the sound of angelic music.”

Here, the use of folklore to challenge reality forces a reconsideration of patriarchal systems. Through the story of Kummernis, Tokarczuk evaluates the concept of a miracle. When Kummernis becomes a miracle herself, growing a beard to evade a marriage, the Devil warns her that people will reject her. They will reject her because women are not supposed to have beards, and her appearance challenges the natural order the church establishes and the notion that miracles should be “sublime” in their effects instead of mundane.

“When dreams repeat events from the past, when they mangle them, turn them into images, and sift them through a web of meanings, I start to fear that the past, just like the future, will remain obscure and inscrutable forever.”

Dreams are a constant presence in House of Day, House of Night, with the narrator consistently referencing them. She believes that there is a science to dreams, and they represent the inability to truly understand reality. She describes dreams of the past being sifted through a web of meaning, suggesting that when meaning, a subjective view, is ascribed to such dreams, they lose meaning. In this sense, only the present can be trusted, with both the past and future being unknowable.

“He could see his mountains, like mist-wreathed, liquid lines on the horizon. He sniffed the air. The smell, rather than the view, released an avalanche of images, like an overexposed film, torn and out of focus, with no sound, point or plot.”

The region of Silesia, where the novel is set, is a borderland that contains a diverse history of border changes. Pre-WWII, the region was a part of Germany, and when former German residents return, they struggle to recognize their home. When Peter Dieter returns, the scenes he sees are foreign to him. Tokarczuk, however, explores how other sense can evoke memory, with the smell of the area bringing back Peter’s memories that his eyes cannot locate. She uses a simile, comparing smell to an overexposed film, suggesting that despite the lack of an image, the smell allows Peter to recognize his past, reflecting borderlands as an ontological condition.

“A day later the vegetable patches were well established. Marta stood gazing at them with flushed cheeks—it was as if a sleeping army had arisen, as if soldiers had sprouted from underground in battle formation. First the crowns of their heads appeared, then their powerful shoulders and erect bodies standing at attention, from which a rippling green canopy would finally unfold”

One of the primary means of cultivating magical realism is by transforming the natural world into a fantasy. Tokarczuk creates this connection by comparing the vegetables Marta plants with soldiers emerging from the ground, standing ready in a battle formation. This simile creates a sense of wonder, as if the nature surrounding the women exists in a different reality. This description also creates a space in which the relationship between the women and nature is challenged. With the vegetables described as soldiers, there remains a question of whether they are there to defend the women or attack them.

“Thanks to the wooden hat, his life improved a bit. He planted a White Transparent apple tree at the spot in the garden where in his dreams each night he buried his dead child. But he never did taste its apples, because the war came and he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. Apparently it was the hat that killed him, because he refused to swap it for a helmet.”

The relationship between Franz Frost and his wooden hat explores how individuals create meaning through their own experiences. Franz Frost begins wearing the hat to protect himself from the malevolence of a newly discovered planet, believing it will prevent his nightmares from plaguing him or coming true. When he enters the war, he chooses the wooden hat over a helmet, leading to his death. He believed the hat protected him from a greater threat than the helmet did, exploring the ways in which he valued such threats.

“Through her eyes? Marta will look at an unidentifiable something, dark, damp and sticky, and will no longer be able to avert her gaze. That sodden image will enter her brain and smother it. And that will be her death.”

This excerpt is one of the many ways the narrator considers the possibilities of Marta’s death. She explores how death may arrive through each sense, highlighting how each of these senses influence a person’s identity, with the passage containing sensory details such as “dark, damp and sticky” and the sensation of “smother[ing].” For Marta, if death enters her eyes, the way she sees the world will change. The world will become polluted in her eyes, and this will in turn impact her mind, changing who she is.

“She was sure to have opened her wig chest and now she’d be weaving that dead headgear, of no use to anyone. She’d be plaiting strands of hair from strange women who have either died or are living somewhere on the other side of the world, traveling, aging in old people’s homes, their youth dried up inside them like a scab.”

Tokarczuk treats the hair that Marta uses for her wigs as a motif that reflects the coexistence of the living alongside the dead. This excerpt describes Marta giving dead hair a new life, while also reflecting on where the women who grew them are now. The hair remains unchanged, while these women age and die. The hair is a legacy, a part of them that goes on living, creating a paradox in which the women may be dead, but their hair is still alive.

“But Leo thought everything seemed slightly different. How? He didn’t know. In this safe, familiar view he could sense a falseness. He sniffed the air, as if expecting to smell burning. After several minutes, as his body went numb with cold, he realized that the world had in fact ended, although it had retained the outward appearance of continuity. So that was what the end was like.”

Leo, the clairvoyant, struggles to accept reality. Premonitions of the end of the world lead him to believe that the world will truly end. When it does not, he refuses to accept that he is wrong. Instead, he reorders the world in his mind, believing that the world did end, and that now everything is different. He feels that it is not right, and he, like so many other characters, must find a way to move forward through this uncertainty.

“Only the small red flares of the cigarettes, like overripe fireflies, moved up and down, marking the route of hands to mouths in the darkness.”

Similes are the primary way Tokarczuk develops the fractured world of House of Day, House of Night. The comparisons she makes often focus on creating an alternate vision of reality that blends the human world with the natural. In this case, cigarettes become “fireflies,” and adults smoking together becomes a scenic summer night.

“The nocturnal light had rubbed out all the sharp angles and brought opposites closer together. The borders between one thing and another had been effaced; things there were several of all looked the same, like exact copies of a single one.”

The influence of the border between Poland and the Czech Republic impacts the characters in various ways, emphasizing borderlands as an ontological condition. As the narrator looks into the illuminated night, her vision blurs, and the borders that separate objects in her sight disappear. Distinct objects become one, while many objects of the same nature lose their identifying features. This excerpt demonstrates the ways in which borders are used to make meaning. Just as these borders define objects, the border between Poland and the Czech Republic form nations.

“At the last moment they asked what sort of mushrooms they were, and when I told them, they wouldn’t eat—as if eating or not eating something could save us from death. We’re all going to die, regardless of whether we eat this or that, do this or that, or think this or that. Death would seem to be a more natural event than life.”

When the narrator offers friends a dish of mushrooms that many consider minorly poisonous, the friends refuse the dish. The narrator reflects on how her friends seem to identify death as another, negative experience, defined by a border that separates it from life. The narrator, however, accepts that death is inevitable, inviting it into her life and living alongside it. In her mind, it is a universal experience no one can escape, invoking the coexistence of the living alongside the dead.

“Maybe this is what Marta had in mind when she said something that shocked me at the time: ‘If you find your place you’ll be immortal.’”

Marta’s belief that people form their identities through places is explored in various ways in the novel. In this instance, she discusses how finding the right place of belonging makes a person “immortal.” The narrator receives this opinion with shock, not immediately understanding it. The sentiment reflects the relationship between places and people, how they create a united identity, the place influencing the person, and the person leaving a legacy in the place that will outlive them.

“People who are born where there’s a lot of water, in fertile lake lands or on the banks of great rivers, are different. Their bodies are soft, fragile and sensitive, their skin is darker, with an olive tinge, cool and damp with blue veins beneath.”

Marta develops her theory of the relationship between people and places by suggesting that it is not merely a factor in personal identity but in physical attributes as well. She tells the narrator that the kind of land a person is born on defines who they are. In this excerpt, she makes an association between water and a person’s qualities of fragility and sensitivity, qualities that reflect the fluidity of water and blend the boundaries between humans and the natural world.

“They would bring their wives or husbands home to the mansion, and then they would have to build a new wing or floor, or convert the attic into living quarters, so the mansion kept growing along with them, plunging deeper into the park or pushing higher into the sky.”

The von Goetzen mansion is an example of how places define people and people define places. The von Goetzen family shares the mansion, its beauty and pleasantness shaping them into the adults they are. When they begin families of their own, they return to the mansion and add to it, leaving their mark. As time goes on, the family grows, as does the house to reflect them. The house becomes the von Goetzen family, housing them and their history.

“In Switzerland you should always book a room on the top floor of a hotel to get a view of these fascinating roofs. They don’t lay the tiles the same way as in Silesia, but like scales, so the houses look like enormous fishes turned belly up, cast onto land from seas beyond imagination.”

Once again, Tokarczuk uses a simile to wed scenes of reality with the fantasy, the human world with that of nature. In this instance, roof tiles are compared to the scales of fish, transforming the scene of the city into a fantastical sea, where fish grow larger than anyone expects. These similes challenge reality, supporting the notion that reality is created by those who see it, meaning each person sees a different world.

“She recognizes an era not by the people who were alive then, because people are woefully similar to one another, but by the color of the air and the leaves, the way the light fell on objects.”

Marta embodies the principle of reality being a unique experience to every person. She orders her memories by creating eras based on her perception of the world at the time. She sees history as a series of colors, impacted by the way the world looked and felt, as well as how she felt. She finds this a more impactful way of distinguishing time than doing so through people.

“But I have eaten all sorts of mushrooms. Whenever I find something I don’t recognize, I break a little bit off and put it in my mouth. I wet it with spittle, rub it against my palate with my tongue, taste it and swallow it. And I haven’t died of mushroom poisoning yet. Maybe as a result of other things, yes, but not because of mushrooms.”

The narrator fosters a special relationship with mushrooms, admiring their beauty and lamenting the ways humans define them. While others are concerned by the appearance of mushrooms, or the supposed toxicity, the narrator approaches them without judgement. She even eats them without knowing anything about them. This is a manifestation of her ability to see the coexistence of the living alongside the dead.

“He said there were whole villages waiting for them at the other end, empty stone houses with furniture and fittings beyond their wildest dreams, and that they could have the lot—they’d just go in and it’d all be theirs. As they breastfed their children the young women dreamed of wardrobes full of silk dresses, leather shoes with heels, handbags with gold-plated clasps, lace napkins and snow-white table clothes.”

One of the unique features of Silesia is how people constructed their lives there after World War II. As Germans left, they often left their entire lives behind. As Polish people from eastern Poland arrived in these towns and villages, they found houses untouched and fully stocked. When Old Bobol and his family travel, they hear of these houses, and begin imagining what their lives could be. When they arrive, they will lead new lives, made of a mix between their past experiences, as well as the Germans who lived there before them, reflecting borderlands as an ontological condition.

“We haven’t treated them with much respect, preferring like everyone else to have shiny new things with traces of glue from the price sticker and a guarantee that they’ll last, in the form of a bold glint of light, a perfectly smooth surface or the faintly metallic smell of a factory far away.”

The narrator and R. do not preserve the treasures they find in their gardens, buried by the Germans who lived there before. They prefer the new. This preference is complicated, as it in part reflects the narrator’s desire for what reminds her and others of youth. It also, however, reveals a desire to be unique, and to forge her own identity, one not influenced by what came before.

“In time the German houses grew more willing to surrender their contents to their new Polish owners—pots, plates, mugs with handles, bedding, and clothes that were almost new, some of them truly elegant. Sometimes they found simple wooden toys that at once they gave to their children—after years of war this was real treasure.”

When the new Polish residents finally settle into their new homes, they begin to notice what was left behind. These objects cross a border themselves, going from being the belongings of Germans to their new Polish owners. Over the course of time, these household objects stop being foreign items and a part of the new residents’ lives.

“Then she’d be off to the tailor’s to place her order and even pay in advance, just to be sure she’d have that garment, otherwise she would fall out of step with time, slip from ‘now’ into ‘then,’ into the realm of twilight and extinction.”

The wife fears being out of touch with society and fashion, representative of a greater fear of losing youth. She orders dresses ahead of time, not wanting to lose the present. She believes that if she does, it hints at death, and treats it as a sign of decay.