Summary
In Chapter Four, Finch, at the gates of Larkhill, doses himself with four tablets of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, or LSD. He regrets it as the hallucinogen kicks in, but reminds himself he wanted to know what it’s like being V. He imagines the smiling faces of nonwhite and gay people and realizes he misses them. He goes inside a room and sees Delia Surridge, who lets Prothero take Finch to Room Five. Finch realizes he is the one imprisoning himself; he removes his clothes and screams, standing at sunrise in the middle of Stonehenge, that he is free.
Chapter Five sees V playing jukebox records at the Shadow Gallery. Eve asks if he’s going to do something or just wait out the chaos. He says the time has come to put certain things to order. He leads her through a series of passages and rooms; she understands that all the rooms are connected to each other. They pass a room of TVs stacked on top of each other, showing live feeds of London surveillance cameras. They pass the rose room, where V says he trusts her to take care of his blooms. They carry packages of gelignite explosives down a winding staircase to a train platform, where there is an ornate train full of flowers. They place the explosives behind the lilies. V acts evasive and cryptic, refusing to explain what the plan with the train and explosives is. V says he’s waiting for the man.
In Chapter Six, on the evening of November 9, 1998, Helen Heyer is reading a clipboard and eating a box of chocolates while her husband Conrad kisses her foot, leg, and thigh. As he tries to initiate sex, she smacks him with the clipboard and forces a chocolate in his mouth, saying that he can have more when he’s Leader. Alistair and Creedy meet for a walk, discussing an upcoming parade. Meanwhile, Rosemary gets ready to go out, taking her pistol with her. Alistair meets with Helen to have sex. Helen says there are spy cameras in every party member’s bedroom, but of course none of them are working right now. V watches from his bank of TVs. The Leader reluctantly leaves his computers when he learns his motorcade is ready. He kisses the screen and says “I forgive you.” A disheveled Finch walks back to London. He sees a closed Victoria Underground station and descends the stairs. Walking in the dark, he spots a light ahead, then comes across V’s flower-filled train.
Chapter Seven opens with the Leader narrating his thoughts as he passes smiling Londoners in his motorcade. He used to talk to God about his racist and homophobic hatred. He was vindicated that God was real when he first saw Fate’s screens. Then she betrayed him, and now he’s alone, except for the people on the streets, who love him. He wonders if he should wave back. In the Underground, Finch follows the sound of singing to find a dummy of a busker wearing V’s mask next to a tape player. V appears and greets Finch by name. Meanwhile, Rosemary pushes her way through the crowd to the Leader’s car. Creedy recognizes her as a high party member and tells the guards to let her through, saying it’ll look good. The Leader opens his door and extends his hand to shake hers. Rosemary shoots him in the head. Simultaneously, Finch draws his gun on V’s shadowy form; he fires four shots while V stabs Finch’s shoulder. Rosemary is tackled by guards. V takes Finch’s gun and says there’s no flesh or blood within his cloak to kill, there’s only an idea, and ideas are bulletproof. V leaves. Finch removes the dagger and crawls along a passage until he finds a puddle of blood. He raises his arms and declares that he killed V after all.
Chapter Eight opens at the hospital. Creedy says there’s nothing they can do when half the Leader’s head is blown away. Rosemary is being interrogated and asked if she was hired by V. Helen and Conrad arrive at the hospital and Creedy says they’ll declare a state of emergency and deal with V, who intends to appear at midnight to provoke further disorder. However, Finch arrives and says V is dead; he shot him. A package arrives for Conrad. Helen says Creedy thinks he’s in charge of the Finger. She smiles at Conrad and says she might be in the mood tonight. Panels cut to the trail of blood leading from the underground station and up the stairs of the Shadow Gallery. Stone questions a rattled-looking Finch about the drugs he is on and whether he truly killed V. Finch pretends he doesn’t remember where it happened, though he clearly recalls the image of the Victoria Station entrance.
Conrad opens the package to find it is a videocassette of Helen cheating with Alistair. He sobs at the images. Creedy walks the streets, where looting is taking place, listening to his own voice over the public broadcast speakers saying that there is no need to panic, the terrorist V has been mortally wounded and is presumed dead. He meets with Alistair, who kills him with a straight razor. V finds Eve and collapses. As he dies, he says that the country is not yet saved, but the old ideas have come to rubble, and a rose must bloom from the rubble. He tells he she must discover the face that lies behind the mask, but she must never know his face. He says that the Victoria line is blocked between Whitehall and St. James stations; she must give him a Viking funeral. He wishes her good luck and says he loves her.
In Chapter Nine, Eve follows the trail of blood back to the station. She remembers things V has said about his final plans. She isn’t sure what to do. She returns to the body and considers approaching it and removing the mask, revealing, in her imagination, different faces that could lie behind it: her father’s, then Gordon’s, then her mother’s. She realizes she must become V. She walks to a mirror and smiles at herself.
Chapter Ten takes place on November 9, 1998, at 9:30 PM. People are rioting. From a rooftop, Finch and Stone watch and comment on how V has become an all-purpose symbol to the people. Finch says V took the lid off the bitterness that he been brewing in the people, who lost families during the war. Finch says his visit to Larkhill did the same for him. He is leaving now, and following his own orders. He suggests Stone do the same and tells him to take care. Alistair enters the Heyers’ house to find it empty except for the sex tape of him and Helen playing on a TV. While Alistair is watching, Conrad sneaks up and hits him with a wrench. Alistair slashes back with his straight razor. As riots increase in the streets, Helen comes home to find Alistair dead before the staticy TV. Conrad reaches up to her and says he won’t come between them, but that he might have cut a vein. She refuses his hand and calls him a piece of shit and accuses him of ruining her plans. Instead of helping him stop his bleeding throat, she points the surveillance camera at him and hooks it to the TV so he can watch himself die.
Police ask Stone for orders; he wonders where Creedy is. The police say the people will probably stop rioting when they realize V isn’t going to show up. The police say the sound of Big Ben striking midnight is reassuring. Stone remembers it blew up months earlier and realizes the sound is coming from the public broadcast speakers. He looks up to see V standing on a roof. V announces to the crowd that, since the dawn of mankind, a handful of oppressors have accepted responsibility over lives that people should have accepted for themselves. They took power and the people gave it away by doing nothing. V says Downing Street will be reduce to ruins and the people will have to choose what comes next: lives of their own, or a return to chains. The crowd rushes the police. Stone walks unsteadily away and around a corner, where V appears and holds Stone. V’s face becomes wavy then Stone’s vision goes dark.
In the eleventh and final chapter, Eve, now dressed as V, prepares the original V’s body for his Viking funeral. She narrates how his foes thought his vendetta was sought upon their flesh alone, but he also gored their ideology. Now that the door is open for the people, Eve will not lead them, but help them build. She puts his body in his train next to the lilies and gelignite. She sends the train hurtling through the tunnel toward where rubble seals the line between Whitehall and St. James. She goes up to the roof and removes her mask, then watches Downing Street explode. She descends in the elevator and wakes up Stone; she is wearing the Guy Fawkes mask. She welcomes Stone to the Shadow Gallery, and says it is her home.
The point of view ends with Finch, who is walking away from London. He encounters Helen Heyer, who says her car was turned over by a mob and she has sheltered with tramps for protection. She says they’re survivors, they need each other. She suggests they could build a small army together and restore order. He puts a hand on her shoulder and pushes her away. She calls him a queer as he walks off. The book ends with Finch lighting his pipe and walking north out of London on the darkened M1 motorway.
Analysis
The mystery of Finch’s disappearance is resolved with the revelation that, contrary to the belief that he killed himself, he takes LSD and visits Larkhill. With the aid of the hallucinogen, Finch hopes to better understand the mindset of someone like V, hoping that it will lead him to discover where V is hiding.
Contrary to Finch's expectations, the LSD reminds him of the beautiful multicultural world that Norsefire has destroyed. Feeling also the fears of a prisoner tortured at Larkhill, Finch comes to the conclusion that he is imprisoned in a cage of his own making. Once he has this breakthrough, the hallucination drops away and Finch is able to discover that he is free of the mental chains that had bound him. It is unclear whether he stands at the actual Stonehenge site, or if his hallucination has continued to populate his visual environment with metaphors.
In his characteristic fashion, V refuses to tell Eve directly what his final act of terror will be, but he hints that it will have something to do with a train full of flowers and explosives. The image evokes how he managed to break free from Larkhill by making a bomb out of gardening supplies; the image also combines his trademark violence and romanticism. V’s suggestion that he is “waiting for the man” foreshadows his coming confrontation with Finch.
When Finch stumbles across the entrance to the abandoned Victoria line Underground station, it’s clear that his LSD experiment was successful in helping him locate V. The moment is significant, because it marks the first time the investigators have infiltrated V’s hideout. Meanwhile, Rosemary’s bitterness leads her to symbolically kill the Leader as a way of expunging the growing resentment for the state that has stood by and subjected her to so much cruelty.
The climactic scene shows Finch fire four shots at V. Strangely, V does not immediately die, but is able to tell Finch that he is merely an idea, and ideas are bulletproof. After V dies and Evey prepares for his “Viking funeral” in the explosives-filled train, the remaining party members of Norsefire pick each other off in their desperate bids for power. Evey narrates how it wasn’t enough for V to seek vengeance through killing the individuals responsible for carrying out Larkhill experiments; he also had to destroy their fascist ideology to ensure others wouldn’t be able to recreate their injustices.
The seemingly absurd statement that V cannot die because he is an idea proves true when Evey takes up the V persona herself. In this way, V can never die as long as each V trains a successor to don the next mask. After she carries out the attack on the prime minister’s residence at Downing Street, Eve descends to where Stone is lying unconscious. Using the same lines V used on her when she arrived at the Shadow Gallery, Eve shows how she is already beginning to set up Stone as her replacement, as V did to her.
As a final means of emphasizing the story’s thematic interest in individualism and freedom, V for Vendetta ends with Finch walking alone out of the city. The image suggests that it is within anyone’s power to not abide by hierarchical systems of authority that limit the freedoms of individuals.
