

In my dreams, it forms into a perfect representation of Lot’s wife, head over her shoulder, staring along the motorway at the approaching traffic, in a vacuum of fatalistic calm.ĭear Esther. My neck aches from staring up at the aerial it mirrors the dull throb in my gut where I am sure I have begun to form another stone. All suffering, physical and psychological, becomes one, becomes the overwhelming question the narrator pursues. This theme is reinforced as the narrator begins to draw connections between the suffering of his own body from the kidney stones, the island, and the car crash. It had an air of uneasy permanence to it, like all the other buildings here erosion seems to have evaded it completely.” The aerial has a kind of eternal quality about it that hints that whatever it has to do with the narrator’s suffering, it cannot be his alone.

“I was expecting just the aerial and a transmitter stashed in a weatherproof box somewhere on the mount. It’s also important to note that while the narrator speculates that perhaps the island was created by the catastrophe that killed Esther, he also notes that the aerial is strangely permanent. The meaningfulness of seemingly random events is a theme in Dear Esther, even in the gameplay structure itself, which makes random changes each time that it’s played.

It represents the culmination of his search. It’s particularly relevant that its position seems so intentional to the Narrator, as if it’s something he must approach and scale. The mount and the beacon come up again and again. I am drawn by the aerial and the cliff edge: there is some form of rebirth waiting for me there.”

Was this island formed during the moment of impact when we were torn loose from our moorings and the seatbelts cut motorway lanes into our chests and shoulders, did it first break surface then? I find myself easily slipping into the delusional state of ascribing purpose, deliberate motive to everything here. The mount is clearly the focal point of this landscape it almost appears so well placed as to be artificial. To understand the island, for him, is to understand the death of his wife. Somehow, he believes that this lonely place can offer him solace and meaning in the face of the loss of Esther. The island and the Narrator are closely related.
Dear esther analysis full#
I return each time leaving fresh markers that I hope, in the full glare of my hopelessness, will have blossomed into fresh insight in the interim.” No matter how hard I correlate, it remains a singularity, an alpha point in my life that refuses all hypothesis. Somewhere, between the longitude and latitude a split opened up and it beached remotely here. I sometimes feel as if I’ve given birth to this island. The narrative in Dear Esther is famously opaque, but hopefully this commentary on the dialogue and events within the game will help to flesh out the underlying themes of the work, if not the specific narrative details.ĭear Esther. Dear Esther resolutely, and I think intentionally, resists any kind of complete analysis, but over the months since I first played and replayed the game, a kind of shape has been forming in my mind, one that grows and builds upon itself each time I go through it.
