Frieder’s Suicide Attempt

Frieder’s Suicide Attempt is the near-fatal episode that first makes Frieder’s wish not to live a fact of the shared past, while refusing to turn that act into a settled explanation of him. He gathers his mother’s sleeping pills, drinks wine, and goes down to the cellar; his father, searching there for a missing axe, finds him and brings about his rescue. Later, Frieder distinguishes wanting to die from being unable to go on living, and the narrator recognizes that no single account can explain either the first attempt or Frieder’s eventual death by suicide.

The Attempt and Its Accidental Interruption

Frieder’s mother took one or sometimes two sleeping pills each evening, changing the dose so often that she had no clear count of how many remained. Frieder secretly diverted tablets from the supply until he had enough. The attempt was concealed within that ordinary household uncertainty: the missing pills did not immediately expose what he was preparing to do.

After school, Frieder drank a two-liter bottle of Imiglykos wine. He went down to the cellar and swallowed the tablets with the last of the wine. He later woke with a tube in his throat. The blunt sequence—collecting pills, drinking, descending to the cellar, and waking after medical intervention—establishes the physical gravity of the attempt without supplying a reason for it.

His father was home at an unusual time. Normally he would have been in the barn or at work at the post office, but he had received a load of wood and needed to prepare firewood. He went looking for an axe and could not find it. Searching the cellar, he found Frieder instead. The missing axe did not cause the attempt or function as an intended means; the search for it brought Frieder’s father to the place where his son lay.

The narrator later tells Frieder that the axe saved his life. Frieder answers that it was an axe that was not even there, and calls it a damn axe. The exchange holds together the contingency of the rescue and its emotional awkwardness: an ordinary errand interrupted the attempt, but neither the accident nor the joke explains why Frieder had wanted not to live.

A Distinction Without a Resolution

When the narrator asks what Frieder had meant by the attempt, Frieder says that he did not want to kill himself; he merely did not want to live anymore, and he believes there is a difference. The distinction gives the narrator language for an experience that cannot be reduced to a simple declaration of intent. It does not make the attempt less serious: Frieder had taken the pills and wine, and he woke only after being found and treated.

The novel keeps that difference active rather than treating it as a conclusive diagnosis or a reassuring answer. The narrator recalls that Frieder would think for long stretches and then look toward him as if waiting for an invitation to speak. The narrator’s repeated prompt, asking what he had worked out, frames Frieder’s reflections as tentative discoveries shared between friends. His account of the attempt is one such discovery, but it does not disclose a stable motive.

The narrator also remembers how difficult it was to know what Frieder’s mood meant. A tired expression might look like sadness; apparent happiness might, in the narrator’s fear, signal that Frieder had already decided to die. Frieder had said that when someone who has thought about suicide for a long time suddenly becomes cheerful without a reason, it means that the decision has been made. In this context, Frieder’s tired grin before riding his bicycle does not settle the narrator’s worry. At school, the empty place beside him brings back the image of Frieder hanging from a rope in the hayloft. The attempt thus persists not only as past action but as a threat the narrator repeatedly tries to read in ordinary gestures and absences.

Rescue, Choice, and the Friends’ Limits

The narrator directly asks whether he should rescue Frieder if he suddenly fell through ice and faced immediate danger, or whether Frieder would be angry. After a long pause, Frieder says that the narrator may rescue him: he thinks he should be allowed to choose for himself. His answer makes room for both the possibility of rescue and his claim to agency. It does not establish that he is safe, or that his permission can tell his friends what to do in every later crisis.

Frieder then tells the narrator that someone who wonders what will happen without him will not go through with suicide, because such a person believes his presence matters. The idea offers a sign of attachment, but it remains Frieder’s observation, not a dependable rule that resolves the danger. The narrator’s questions and Frieder’s answers repeatedly approach the boundary between respecting a choice and intervening to preserve a life, without turning that tension into certainty.

Later, after the police confrontation, the narrator sits beside Frieder and asks what happened. Frieder says that he had deliberately set things up so the officer would shoot him. The narrator reacts with violence: he slaps Frieder, knocks him from his chair, pins him down, and beats him while condemning him for putting the others in danger. Frieder turns onto his side and tries to throw the narrator off, but does not fight back. The episode makes the attempt’s unresolved meaning newly urgent: what had once been an act discovered through a missing tool has become a danger Frieder can deliberately bring into a confrontation involving other people.

Retrospective Meaning

The narrator later asks why Frieder had wanted to die the first time. Talking with him makes the question grow fainter until it seems to disappear, but no answer emerges. When Frieder’s later suicide succeeds, the narrator wonders whether it arose from the same reasons as the earlier, failed attempt. The uncertainty survives both the conversations and the outcome; the first attempt cannot be made into a key that explains the death.

Instead, the narrator holds onto the difference between an irreversible act and the choice to remain alive for another day. If he did not kill himself today, he could still do so tomorrow; if he did so today, he could not choose otherwise tomorrow. That reasoning belongs to the narrator’s later reflection, not a resolution Frieder reaches. In the novel’s recollection, the failed attempt is therefore both a specific episode of overdose and a continuing point of reference for questions neither friendship nor hindsight can answer: what a person means by not wanting to live, how rescue can coexist with choice, and what a survival does—and does not—reveal about the next crisis.