In The House of the Spirits, words and stories hold deep significance. Old Pedro García is admired for his storytelling abilities, while Nívea captivates young Clara with magical family stories, hoping to spark her curiosity and encourage her to speak again. Férula's storytelling is so vivid that "her listener felt as if he were there," and Pedro Tercero's songs are more persuasive than the pamphlets he hands out. Language is powerful, and Clara believes that "by giving problems a name they tended to manifest themselves...; whereas if they remained in the limbo of unspoken words, they could disappear by themselves." Names also hold importance, as the names Clara, Blanca, and Alba form "a chain of luminous words" that link them together. Clara is convinced that Spanish and Esperanto are the only languages that interest beings from other dimensions, while Esteban feels that English is superior to Spanish for describing scientific and technological concepts.
Yet, the written word carries the greatest weight in the novel—after all, the family's history could not have been told without Clara's notebooks, which "bore witness to life." Uncle Marcos's travel and fairy tale books "inhabit the dreams of his descendants," offering Clara, Blanca, and Alba a shared mythology. The writing in Clara's notebooks reflects her mental state, and her letters with Blanca "salvaged events from the mist of improbable facts." Jaime builds a room filled with books, and Nicolás writes fifteen hundred pages on spirituality. Even the government recognizes the power of writing: "With the stroke of a pen the military changed world history, erasing every incident, ideology, and historical figure of which they disapproved." When the political police arrive for Alba, their final act of destruction is setting "an infamous pyre" ablaze with Jaime's collection, Uncle Marcos's books, Nicolás's treatise, and "even Trueba's opera scores." Thus, it is fitting that Alba fights this violence through writing, as both Clara's ghost and Ana Díaz advise her. By using Clara's notebooks, Blanca's letters, and other family documents, Alba discovers understanding and resilience through writing: "I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events...I want to think that my task is life and that my mission is not to prolong hatred but simply to fill these pages."