50 pages • 1 hour read
Per Petterson, Transl. Anne BornOut Stealing Horses
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Birds
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses Nazi persecution of Jewish people and the accidental death of a child.
Birds appear as a motif throughout the novel and connect with all of its key themes. They also represent the power of memory and the fragility of life. In the novel’s first paragraph, Trond sits at his window watching small titmice bang against the glass and thinking, “I don’t know what they want that I have” (5). Often Finding a Sense of Place in Nature, Trond has even put a bird table out so that he can observe them each morning. However, he often puts barriers around himself. As with the titmice on this morning, he has memories that are trying to break through those barriers.
Birds are present in his memory of the pivotal scene the morning after Odd’s death, when Trond and Jon go “out stealing horses” and then climb a large birch, where Jon shows him a nest of goldcrests. Trond is awed that “something so little can come alive and just fly away” (32), and his inability to comprehend Jon’s actions when he grinds the entire nest into dust suggests a kind of innocence; readers later learn that Jon no longer has the luxury of such innocence, having discovered the fragility of life through the accident that killed Odd. His actions with the goldcrest nest emphasize Jon’s impotent anger and also The Pivotal Role of History in Shaping Identity.
Elsewhere in the novel, birds appear in connection with Trond’s desire for Solitude and Time for Self-Reflection, showing his recognition of his own wistful longings for the family and permanence he was deprived of when his father left. The swans on the pond “are still here with the brood they produced in the spring; the young swans as big as their parents now” (106), swimming together as a unit. Trond remembers that when he went to the train station to await his father’s arrival that never happened, “there was a great silence high up under the roof where the pigeons sat in long rows, […] and made their homes there all their lives (241). By contrast, Trond has lived in too many places to count.
Movies and Books
References to movies and books build a motif and provide a perspective through which Trond contextualizes and reflects on key moments in his life. Trond’s relationships with animals are full of references to old American Westerns, as he imagines jumping astride a running horse like “Zorro did it in the film” or escaping US Marshalls while riding through the woods with his father (27); he reflects that calling Lyra “good dog” sounds silly, something “from Lassie from the cinema-going of [his] past, it would not surprise [him] […]. It was not from Dickens” (107). Trond often distinguishes between the “artificial” appearance of things in films and the weightier matters in novels by Charles Dickens, drawing a line between the carefree memories of his youth and the more serious concerns of adulthood. In one reference, Trond says the coincidence of his living near Lars would annoy him in a modern novel:
It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you’re reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again (67).
He knows that even though he has returned to these remote woods, he cannot return to the vanished world of his youth and that the events of 1948 will not come together like an equation in order to restore balance to his life—but the insistence of his memories suggests that he has never stopped hoping it is a possibility.
Doubles and Mirrors
The motif of doubles is expressed in many ways, all of which emphasize the key double in the novel: the dual life that Trond’s father lives, first as a member of the Resistance and then in the life he makes after leaving his family. There are two sets of twins, and in both sets one twin dies; there are often pairs of animals appearing together, such as the two hares Jon shoots on the morning Odd dies; Trond has had two wives and two daughters; and Lars and Trond as adults mirror each other, both living a life of solitude, estranged from their families with only a dog for company. At one point, Trond wonders to what extent Lars is indeed a double of himself, whether he took Trond’s place in his father’s other life and lived “years out of [Trond’s] life that [he] should have lived” (213).
Among these doubles, there is often a sense that one is temporary and one is permanent, one is primary and one is secondary, or one is real and one is illusion. Per Petterson uses the doubles to illustrate Trond’s struggle to find the truth in his illusory memories and orient himself in the two parts of his life. Trond often catches a glimpse of himself in mirrors and windowpanes and wonders whether his outer appearance is a true reflection of who he is. This is emphasized in his acknowledgement that “what [he] was most afraid of in this world was to be the man in Magritte’s painting” (132), a Surrealist image that shows a man looking into a mirror only to see the back of his head as the painting’s viewer sees it. Both the painting and the motif of doubles create a sense of division and duplication, and an inability to identify—in imagery or in memory—what is real and what is only perception. In wondering whether he is chasing a mirror image of his own life, Trond illustrates his internal conflict about his father’s double life.
Borders and Crossroads
Borders and crossroads as a motif represent The Pivotal Role of History in Shaping Identity. Trond is both literally and figuratively at a crossroads in the summer of 1948; at the time, Trond does not know just what a dramatic crossroads this will be. Petterson builds dramatic irony when Trond later remembers, “[I]t was my thought that [my father] was in need of the time and the peace to plan out a different life from the one that was behind him […]. We’re at a crossroads now, he had said” (55). That summer proves to be a definitive border between his father’s old life and a new one. Trond’s own crossing of the border into Sweden, with first his father and later his mother, represents his passage into adulthood; like growing up, the literal passage into Sweden “felt different although everything looked the same after we had crossed” (229).
