Life, Death, and Stories in What Remains of Edith Finch

Last year I played What Remains of Edith Finch for the first time, and this game has pretty much stayed on my mind ever since.

There’s a moment early on where you can look through the peep hole in the library door, and if you do, Edith says, “Edie told me once that every Finch who ever lived is buried somewhere in the library.” This quote conjures the idea of the library as a graveyard, making the lives of its residents the stories written throughout its books. This concept of lives as stories, each ending in death, is woven into the fabric of the entire game.

But for those who haven’t played the game, or maybe need a quick refresher, what is What Remains of Edith Finch?

Synopsis

The game is framed as a series of stories within a story within a story. While the bulk of the game has you play as Edith Finch, the story is framed by an unnamed character reading her journal.

Edith Finch returns to her family’s home. This house has many extensions to it because of how Edie, Edith’s grandmother, wanted all the bedrooms to remain completely untouched. Each bedroom becomes like a museum exhibit, perfectly preserving the memory of its previous occupants. Each bedroom also contains a story that tells us how that family member died (see the image for the full family tree).

All this death gives way to talk of the Finch family being cursed and prompts Edith to question if she should let these stories live on. In the end, after she has experienced all the stories the house has to offer, she passes them on to her unborn son through her journal.

The final moments show us a cutscene with the unnamed character from the beginning. It is Edith’s son, now a teenager, having come to the Finch family home himself to see his mother’s grave.

A Journey Through Stories

Every work of fiction is a story, but this game uses its framing device to make this fact explicit. From the moment Edith’s son opens her journal, putting us in Edith’s shoes, the game is expressing to us that everything we see is diegetically a story.

We can see the emphasis on stories carried into the route you have to take through the house. Edith was left a key when her mother passed away. It doesn’t open the front door to the house, it opens a book. In the first bedroom you can enter, you find a padlock on a book. Opening this book reveals a hidden passage through the house, starting her journey into the locked bedrooms. It’s only in opening this book that Edith can reach the stories of her family.

This isn’t the only hidden passage that’s opened using a mechanism designed with books. There are at least three different hidden passages that involve opening a book, pulling tabs in a popup book, or pushing books together. Moving through the house itself conjures the idea of a journey through stories.

Of course, this is all barely even touching on the core loop of the game. After Edith finds her way into each locked room, be it by a hidden passage or another means, she finds a story. As each story is read, the player lives out that story.

But one last thing before we get into the family’s stories, it’s worth noting that getting to know the family isn’t the only thing of value gleaned from them.

It is only after reading about Molly going out the window that Edith does the same. After she reads about Barbara finding a key in a music box, Edith uses this information to get into the basement. After she reads about Walter leaving through a hatch in the ground and a hole in the wall, Edith leaves the same way.  

Edith is taking what she learns from these stories and using it to help her in her present.

“That History of Imagination and Stubbornness and Madness”

After playing through the first of these short stories in Molly’s room, the next stop is Edie’s (Edith’s great grandma and the matriarch of the house). In here, you can find newspaper clippings framed and displayed, such as one with the headline “Dragon Kills Finch.” Looking at this prompts Edith to explain, “When Edie told people Sven was killed by a dragon, she could also have said he was building a dragon-shaped slide that collapsed. She could have, but she didn’t.”

The placement of this is incredibly important. Right after playing through a story where a young girl becomes a cat, an owl, a shark, and then a monster, you find this story about another fantastic seeming death where the game tells us both the literal thing that happened, and the embellished story that it became.

I don’t think this is to cast doubt on Molly’s story, or any of the stories that will follow it, but to say that no matter how crazy the story might appear, there is truth to it.

There are eleven short stories that we play through, each of which has a varying degree of a fantastical element to it. This ranges from things Milton’s story where he paints himself a doorway to another world that he disappears into it, to Walter’s story of monotony where we can see that the monster haunting him is really a train that passes by each day. 

Walter’s story is around the halfway point, and after you play through it, Edith has this to say about all the stories:

"Though to be honest, I feel as lost as you probably do right now. I think the people in these stories believed them, for what that's worth. And when you look at the house… at that history of imagination and stubbornness and madness, any of it seems possible."

I want to break down this quote a little bit, with the images we get of each member of the family.

We can see the history of imagination with all the artists in the family. Edie wrote and painted, Molly did some creative writing in her diary, Barbara was an actress, Sam was a photographer, Milton was a painter, and Gus is remembered as probably having had a rich imagination – he may not have had time to really turn that into artistry, but the potential was there.

The history of stubbornness is just as clear. Calvin’s determination to fly, Gus’s refusal to be a part of his father’s second wedding, Dawn’s decision to leave and never come back.

And then, the history of madness, where we see how mental illness leads to some of the saddest stories. The purest example of this is Walter, who becomes so defined by his fear that he stops letting himself have a life at all.

The final story we play through, before Edith writes her own, is a tragic fusion of imagination, stubbornness, and madness. This story belongs to Lewis. These three ideas culminate as he creates a fully formed world in his head and chooses to exist in it more than in his real life, and then finally, to end his real life all together.

Lewis’s story has the clearest line between how he sees the world and the reality of the world. At first, we are almost entirely seeing his work at the cannery where he cuts the heads off fish, with just a small window into his imagined world. Slowly that imagined world grows bigger and bigger, until only the fish and his hand remain as evidence of the world he’s escaping.

I think because of this evident distinction, it is also the one that best makes the point of these stories. They aren’t only made-up exaggerations, for better or for worse, they are expressions of the world as these characters saw it. The best way of understanding the Finch family isn’t to simply read about the literal things that happened to them, but too see through their eyes, and take in the world the way they did.

Curses and Conclusions

Is the Finch family cursed? Is the curse real? Is Edie pushing the idea of the curse on the family until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy? This is the line of questions I most often see debated when this game comes up.  

I think the curse is as real as the dragon who killed Sven. It’s true that every Finch dies, but every human dies. Isn’t it a more interesting story to call it a curse than to simply call it tragic?

You can question the reality of how every Finch could have really died, but ultimately, the way the stories are told don’t feel like they’re there to create a dark mystery so much as they are to tell us who these people were. Whether Molly died because she was eaten by a monster, or if she had just died from a sickness, doesn’t really need to matter. What matters is how she tells the story, and what it tells us about how she saw the world.

Dawn wanted to escape from this family and how it cared so much about these stories, but the whole story of the game comes about because of her choice to leave Edith a key that sends her back to the house.

Dawn is the character we get to know the least. She is the only Finch who doesn’t get her own story in the same way everyone else does. She writes the poem that tells Gus’s story, and takes some of the pictures that tell Sam’s, but her own death is only really talked about with a couple quick lines by Edith about her getting sick.

While there is very to pull from when it comes to Dawn, I think we’re meant to take her as a character who changed by the idea of her own death. When her life was coming to an end, she came to understand the importance of remembering people, especially family, through stories. If she died without letting her daughter learn the stories of her family, all the Finches would be forgotten.

Halfway through the game, Edith questions whether she should be passing down these stories or if doing so will pass down some curse. The fact that we’re playing through what she wrote in her journal tells us her decision. And by the end, she has this to say about the choice:

"I'm still not sure what to tell you about all this. If we lived forever, maybe we'd have time to understand things. But as it is, I think the best we can do is try to open our eyes. And appreciate how strange and brief all of this is. This journal was supposed to be for you. But now I hope you'll never see it. I just want to meet you and tell you all these stories myself. But I guess if you're reading this now… things didn't work out that way. This is where your story begins. I'm sorry I won't be there to see it. It's a lot to ask, but I don't want you to be sad that I'm gone. I want you to be amazed that any of us ever had a chance to be here at all. Good luck, Edith."

While Edith writes that she hopes her child will never see this journal, it isn’t because of the fear of passing on some curse, it is because she wants to be able to tell these stories herself. I think that tells us everything we need to know about the supposed curse.

As she expresses in this last bit, we are watching the birth of her child, which is heavily implied to also be her death. We are in the POV of her baby, slowly being pushed into the light of the world. And while this is happening, letters are swirling all around, everything needed to write a story is there. But none of the letters are coming together, none of it’s cementing into place, because this child’s story hasn’t quite started yet.

In the end, our lives are the stories we live, the stories we tell, and the stories told about us. They may not always sound factual, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

What Remains of Edith Finch is ultimately a story about the stories we leave behind, because when we’re gone, they are all that remains.

BONUS: Cycles

Cycles play a huge role in this game. I don’t have a lot I want to dive into with this, but it’s there enough that I want to at least touch on it.

We can see this most obviously with names. Edith is named after her great grandmother, Edie. When we finally get to Edie’s story, that is unfortunately interrupted, it is the story of when Edie was able to return to her home and, presumably, find all the stories her family left behind. In this, we see Edith following the same path as her namesake.

There is also a book of Norwegian folktales in Edie’s room, coupling this how the story of her father, Odin (found in the same room), the game highlights this idea of cycles further. Odin is the All-Father in Norse mythology. He’s the top god. One of the biggest stories in Norse mythology, is Ragnarök, the story of how the rule of the gods ends, leading to a new one being born. It’s a story about cycles, but just as fittingly for this game, it’s a story about how the gods died.

With this idea of Ragnarök, the death of one set of gods and the birth of a new one, it’s worth looking at the birth of Edith’s son again. That move into the light that is seemingly the POV of a baby leaving the womb, could also be read as the dead walking into the light of the afterlife. Birth and death are entwined in the visuals, as one story ends, and another begins.

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