The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Brigge describes the aftermath of his father's death. The death had a big impact on Brigge's life, marking the point at which his childhood ended, and his adulthood began. The death is a symbolic shift in Brigge's life; he no longer has any parents to guide him, and he is let loose into the world with his anxieties and his neuroses, forced to take responsibility for himself. In the aftermath of his father's death, Brigge feels the need to accomplish something. The childhood games in gothic, lavish castles are now a part of his past. Brigge's future is poverty, writing, and attempting to resolve his health concerns, both psychological and physical. This change in Brigge's life is reflected in his notebook. Entries describing Brigge's past and his present rarely overlap. They are compartmentalized, distinguished by being placed on either side of the death of his father. The entries may not be chronological, but their temporal relationship to the death of Brigge's father is clear. The youthful exuberance and ghostly encounters are replaced by socio-economic reflections and realist portrayals of poverty and misery. The death of Brigge's father functions as the delineating moment between these two periods of Brigge's life. The extent to which Brigge continues to reflect on both periods, however, shows that he never truly left his past behind. The memories linger with him, even if they feel as though they are part of another, now distant, world.

Brigge draws a distinction between loving and being loved. To him, being loved by another person is more powerful than the simple act of loving. This dynamic is echoed in other parts of Brigge's life. When discussing his childhood and teenage years, for example, he describes the act of reading. As an adult, Brigge reads alone. He sits in libraries and quietly reads to himself. In his notebook, however, he fondly reflects on being read to and reading to others. His mother read to him and, after her death, Abelone also read passages from books to Brigge. Similarly, he read to them. Reading as an act is not as powerful, Brigge believes, as the act of reading to another person. Reading is like loving in that it becomes exponentially more meaningful when it is directed toward a person. The description of these shared reading experiences adds a tragic element to Brigge's adult life. He is alone, without anyone to read to him. His life seems more alienated and tragic because reading has been reduced to a solitary activity. For all Brigge's insistence that he likes reading, his constant studying of those around him shows that reading has always been something of a social activity for him. To Brigge, to read to someone or to be read something by someone is more meaningful than simply to read. Like love, the purpose is to find common enjoyment with another person to add meaning to an action rather than to endure it alone.

This sense of alienation is also shown through Brigge's story about his neighbor. In the city of Paris, Brigge is surrounded by people. Unlike the cold, empty Danish castles of his youth, the streets of Paris are full of life. The dilapidated apartment where Brigge lives is a constant reminder of the closeness of other people. The thin walls do nothing to mask the sound of other people trying to survive, so Brigge is constantly feeling overwhelmed by the clatter and chaos of everyday life. Despite this noise, despite the proximity of so many people, Brigge feels alone. The neighbor is close to him, so close that he can hear the man through the walls, but the man remains unknown. He is a distant entity, someone who may as well be miles away from Brigge rather than on the other side of the wall. Brigge might be surrounded by people, but he has never felt more alone. To him, the modern poverty of the city is utterly alienating as it drives people further apart in a social sense while denying them space in a physical sense.