In The House of the Spirits, words and narratives hold profound importance. Old Pedro Garcia is cherished for his exceptional storytelling abilities. Nivea shares enchanting family tales with young Clara, hoping to spark her curiosity and encourage her to speak again. Ferula captivates her audience so deeply that "her listener felt as if he were there," while Pedro Tercero's compelling songs persuade more people than all his distributed pamphlets. 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 are also significant, as the names Clara, Blanca, and Alba create "a chain of luminous words" that bind them together. Clara is certain that Spanish and Esperanto are the only languages of interest to beings from other realms, while Esteban argues that English surpasses Spanish in explaining the realms of science and technology.

However, it is the written word that holds the utmost significance in the novel. The family's history would have vanished without Clara's notebooks, which "bore witness to life." Uncle Marcos's travel diaries and fairy tales "inhabit the dreams of his descendants," forming a shared mythology for Clara, Blanca, and Alba. Clara's notebooks reflect her mental state, and her letters to Blanca "salvaged events from the mist of improbable facts." Jaime builds a room filled with books, while Nicolas assembles fifteen hundred pages on spirituality. Even the government recognizes the power of the written word: "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 come for Alba, their ultimate act of destruction is creating "an infamous pyre," consuming Jaime's collection, Uncle Marcos's books, Nicolas's treatise, and "even Trueba's opera scores." Therefore, it is fitting that Alba resists this violence through writing, as both Clara's spirit and Ana Diaz advise her. Using Clara's notebooks, Blanca's letters, and other family documents, Alba finds understanding and strength 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."