Out Stealing Horses

Petterson begins the only chapter of the novel’s third section with the words, “It was as if a curtain had fallen” (239); Trond’s memories in this chapter are structurally and thematically the third act before the curtain closes on the narrative’s drama. As when he learned about his father’s history with the Resistance and crossed the border on horseback into Sweden, Trond knows he has faced a pivotal moment in his personal history, and he observes that everything looks familiar yet feels strange to him. He recalls how waiting for his father’s return even changed his sense of place in nature; no longer is the rain something frigid or exhilarating, as instead “the buildings were greyer than they ever had been and vanished in the rain, with no eyes, no ears, no voices, they told [him] nothing anymore” (242). The falling curtain has marked the dividing point in his life, after which he must become a different person and see the world in a different way.

Trond’s train ride with his mother into Sweden symbolizes this transformation. When they begin their journey, his mother treats him like a child, fussing over him and offering him a scarf—his father’s—to guard against the cold. He responds to her overtures with irritation; he loves her but also resents his father for disappearing and leaving him with her, saying, “[W]hat future I could read in the face before me was not what I had imagined” (246). As Trond watches the Glomma river from the train and imagines it disappearing behind him, he cries tears of mourning for that imagined future, which he knows will no longer be. When he wakes after the train has passed into Sweden, the river and that future are firmly behind him.

That the journey is financed by the uncle who was not killed in the war marks a return to the motif of doubles, emphasizing The Pivotal Role of History in Shaping Identity and the impacts of casual violence on the course of people’s lives. This is true of the larger history of war and occupation that frames Trond’s childhood as well as the moment in Karlstad when he is tempted to take out his anger and confusion at his father by punching a man in the street. Trond recalls seeing lines representing his choices as different roads, the choosing of which would begin “a chain reaction […] which no-one could stop, and there would be no running back, no retracing [his] steps. And if [he] hit the man standing in front of [him he] would have made that choice” (252). Trond’s inaction in that moment marks the rejection of the casual violence that has shaped so many pivotal moments in the novel, making him a different man.

Like crossing the border into Sweden and choosing not to punch the man in the street, the suit Trond’s mother buys with the money from the timber is a symbol of his passage into adulthood. He sheds the clothing of his past to take on a new identity. Looking in the mirror, he realizes, “I looked a completely different person from the one I had been that day. I did not look like a boy at all” (256). Having donned his suit, Trond walks arm in arm with his mother as her equal. That the suit is bought with the proceeds of his physical and emotional labor with his father the previous summer further develops its symbolic resonance as an outward sign of the changes that have taken place. The closing line of the novel, which recollects Trond’s father’s words of advice about deciding when things will hurt, provides a sense of resolution and hope; having made his way through these memories, Trond is now able to determine for himself whether they will cause him pain in the future.