Every Heart A Doorway

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child death and graphic violence.

Doors and keys function as motifs of the theme of The Search for Belonging. As a result, the novella’s title, Every Heart a Doorway, expresses that the characters’ longing for connection and acceptance is central to the narrative. Throughout the story, the portal worlds’ entrances are called doors. Most of the students feel trapped on Earth, forced to wait for these entrances to reappear. Thus, for characters like Loriel, the search for belonging takes the form of a literal search for a magical door: “Sometimes Loriel couldn’t keep her eyes closed long enough to fall asleep, and then she had a tendency to roam the grounds, looking for her missing door” (102). In Chapter 6, the concept of “the duality of the doors” explores how doors are a source of both great joy and deep pain for the children. When the doors first open for the students, they invite them to “a place that underst[ands] [them] so well that it ha[s] reached across realities to find [them]” (105), but the students are left endlessly searching to recapture that sense of belonging when the doors shut them out of their portal worlds.