FATHER AND I (Far och jag)
by Pär Lagerkvist, 1924

Pär Lagerkvist came of traditional peasant stock. His parents were deeply religious, accepting God without question and seeing his hand in the world around them. Although Lagerkvist loved and respected them, at an early age he rejected their religion and their traditions. As station foreman Lagerkvist's father lived in the station house, and for Lagerkvist the powerful locomotives in the station yard symbolized new technology and the fast-moving, uncertain life that swept away his parents' calm, ordered existence.

Following periods of intense, anguished searching for a doctrine to replace his childhood faith, Lagerkvist produced the autobiographical play Guest of Reality (Gäst hos verkligheten), which depicts the child and adolescent torn between his loving, secure but stifling home and the harsh, frightening but fascinating world outside. The previous year, 1924, Lagerkvist had published a collection of short stories entitled Evil Tales (Onda sagor). The dominant strain is misanthropic and satirical: the hero is a fool, the savior is an idiot, the angels are evil, and the romantic lovers die. One of the stories, however, "Father and I" ("Far och jag"), which had first appeared in Svenska Dagbladet in 1923, points toward Guest of Reality and puts the author's struggle between two worlds into both an autobiographical and universal context.

"Father and I" is written in the first person, the narrator being a 10-year-old boy. The narrative line is thin. Father, a railway man, and son go out walking one Sunday, and they both enjoy the sunshine and beautiful natural surroundings. When dusk falls, the boy's fears grow, and they reach a crescendo when an unscheduled train hurtles toward them out of the darkness. The style is simple and in places naive, as Lagerkvist projects the thoughts and fears of a 10-year-old.

The story is a study in contrasts, creating a tension between two different worlds, the smiling daylight walk representing a rural idyll with ancient beliefs, and the dark, terrifying homeward journey adumbrating an unknown and a dangerous outside world soon to be experienced by the boy. In the first part all the sounds, scents, and movements are pleasurable: "There was a twittering of finches and willow warblers, thrushes and sparrows in the bushes, the hum that goes on all around you as soon as you enter a wood. The ground was white with wood anemones, the birches had just come out into leaf, and the spruces had fresh shoots; there were scents on all sides, and underfoot the mossy earth lay steaming in the sun." Above all there is a feeling of familiarity and of security in the setting. When a train comes along, "Father hailed the engine driver with two fingers to his Sunday hat and the driver saluted and extended his hand." They passed a field of oats "where a crofter we knew had a clearing" and went down to a stream that "flowed past where Father had lived as a child." Here the familiarity is allied to continuity.

The change occurs with sunset. The child grows anxious—"the trees were so funny. They stood listening to every step we took, as if they didn't know who we were." By the time they come to the bridge across the stream it is quite dark. The stream, which previously had "murmured in the hot sun, broad and friendly," now "roared down there in the depths, horribly, as though it wanted to swallow us up; the abyss yawned below us." On the outward journey the telegraph poles "sang as you passed them," but now they "rose, ghostly to the sky. Inside them was a hollow rumble, as though someone were talking deep down in the earth and the white porcelain caps sat huddled fearfully together listening to it."

The familiarity gives way to alienation. The child whispers, "Why is it so horrible when it's dark?" Father replies, "No, my child, you mustn't think that. Not when we know there is a God." The child feels separated by his fear, and the chasm widens when a black train unexpectedly hurtles past. In direct contrast to the friendly driver in the first part, this driver "stood there in the light of the fire, pale, motionless, his features as though turned to stone." This time the father doesn't recognize him. The alienation is complete as the boy, filled with dread, stands "gazing after the furious vision….I sensed what it meant: it was the anguish that was to come, the unknown, all that Father knew nothing about, that he wouldn't be able to protect me against. That was how this world, this life, would be for me; not like Father's, where everything was secure and certain. It wasn't a real world, a real life. It just hurtled, blazing, into the darkness that had no end."

It is typical of Lagerkvist that he can introduce natural objects and then in simple, deliberately naive language turn them into symbols for disturbing emotional and philosophical problems. The realistic childhood setting suddenly opens into a yawing gap between two generations and an angst-ridden view of a world void of religious belief. "Father and I" becomes important not just as a key to Lagerkvist's personal dilemma, which was the springboard for much of his writing, but also as an example of a symbolic use of ordinary phenomena to imply existential problems.

—Irene Scobbie