The narrator’s attempt to freeze to death on a snowy night is a crisis in which solitude, intoxication, and grief make death feel less like an abstract possibility than a place he is already entering. On the winter Alb, he drinks vodka as the cold seems to recede, then imagines that Frieder, already dead, has come to take him into the afterlife. The vision gives the episode its uncanny shape, but the novel does not let it settle into a straightforward supernatural rescue: what remains is the narrator’s confrontation with his own wish not to go on, and with the unanswered questions surrounding Frieder’s death.

Setting and Approach

In winter the Alb appears from the south like a wall covered in growth, but its seasons have stripped away any suggestion of shelter: summer’s green and autumn’s yellow-brown have given way to a black-and-white pattern. Along the edge of the steep slope, individual trees stand out as dark spikes against a pale grey sky. The narrator takes a bottle of vodka in a plastic bag and climbs through the snow toward the foot of this wall, moving uphill among bare beeches and untrimmed Christmas trees still standing in the woods.

The trees are covered in a snow mould, and their branches brush the narrator’s cheeks as snow slips down the back of his neck. In the dark, the snow seems to give back the light it had absorbed during the day; the trees and ground glow faintly beneath him and around him as he climbs. The image of a luminous path gives the ascent an eerie beauty, but it does not make the climb safe. The landscape is at once vivid and isolating, and the narrator carries the vodka that will deepen his exposure to the cold.

At the top, he sits in the snow in a field that rises farther up the slope. The setting links the crisis to an earlier encounter with Frieder: the two of them once saw an enormous hare at the forest’s edge, staring at them with an expression they could not read before it turned to graze. That remembered meeting offers no protection now. The narrator is alone, and the field becomes the place where his private distress takes the form of physical danger.

Isolation and the Drinking

The narrator takes a large swallow of vodka. As he sits above the town, he sees lights below and thinks of each one as a happy family, each one as a television that works. The lights make ordinary domestic life visible at a distance, but not available to him. He grows calmer as he watches them, while one by one they disappear: a television switched off, then a family’s light extinguished. The shrinking points of light turn the view into a measure of his separation from the lives below.

He says aloud that Vera is sleeping with Harry. The outburst names a painful fact in the middle of the snowy woods, but the episode does not reduce the crisis to that disclosure. At the top of the hill, he also dwells on the prospect of military service and his fear of being forced to go to Berlin. He says he does not actually want to go there, and describes the crowded streets and bad weather as unbearable. When he considers what he could honestly say about the hypothetical naked Russian, he imagines answering that he would shoot, but only while nobody ordered him to. If he failed the examination, he thinks, he would have to join the army; if he refused, prison awaited. The thought makes his predicament feel tightly closed, even as it shows that his fear is not a single, neatly stated motive.

He does not like spirits, and wants the bottle empty as quickly as possible. After the last swallow, wind rises. He thinks it ought to be cold, yet cannot feel the cold; then he feels it less and less. The text marks the contradiction plainly: the sensation makes no objective sense, but subjectively seems entirely acceptable. The loss of feeling is not evidence that the danger has passed. It is the point at which the narrator’s impaired perception makes the snow and wind harder to register as threats.

The Vision of Frieder

As the narrator grows tired, the tunnel appears, moves toward him, and closes over him until everything grows darker. He hears a rumbling sound, then sees a light at the tunnel’s end and hears Frieder’s voice. His immediate conclusion is that Frieder must already be dead. The vision turns his own possible death into a meeting with his friend: Frieder takes him by the arm, helps him stand, and the two seem to float toward the light.

Frieder tells him to get in. The rumble returns, and they fly through the darkness after a moving light. Frieder asks whether the narrator is there because he has fallen in love with Pauline. The narrator answers that it is because of everything. Frieder says that this does not bother him; in the afterlife, the narrator thinks, nothing bothers anyone. In this sequence, Frieder is both the dead companion the narrator imagines encountering and the familiar person who can ask about the complications of the living world.

The vision makes no explicit distinction between hallucination and supernatural experience. Its circumstances—cold, exhaustion, and heavy drinking—leave a natural explanation available, while its emotional logic gives Frieder an unmistakable presence. The episode’s force lies in that unresolved overlap. Frieder’s appearance is not a confirmed return from death, nor is the scene presented as a settled explanation of what the narrator experiences; it registers how close the narrator feels to joining the friend he has lost.

Frieder’s Death and the Unanswered Question

The crisis gains further meaning from what the narrator has learned about Frieder’s earlier attempt. Frieder tells him that he had not wanted to kill himself, but had merely not wanted to live any longer, and believes there is a difference. That distinction resists a simple equation between despair and a settled intention to die. The narrator later recalls Frieder coming downstairs after a night alone in the house, drinking coffee from a large cup nearly filled to the brim. Frieder insists on going by bicycle; the others hurry to catch the bus, and he gives them a tired grin. By the third lesson, the seat beside the narrator is still empty, and the narrator sees Frieder hanging from the rope in the hayloft. The abrupt contrast between the ordinary morning and the imagined death shows how little reassurance routine can provide.

The narrator’s uncertainty persists beyond the snowy night. When Frieder is quiet or sad, he cannot tell whether he is tired or at risk; when Frieder seems cheerful, that change might itself mean he has made a decision. In another conversation, the narrator asks whether he should rescue Frieder if he suddenly fell through ice. After thinking for a long time, Frieder says that the narrator can rescue him: he wants to choose for himself. The exchange leaves neither a blanket prohibition on rescue nor a clear guarantee of safety. It shows how Frieder can acknowledge his agency while still allowing another person to intervene in an emergency.

Later, after Frieder admits that he deliberately tried to make the policeman shoot him, the narrator beats him. The confession recasts the danger as an attempt to draw lethal force from someone else, and the narrator’s violence expresses anger at being implicated in a situation from which he cannot simply stand aside. Much later, the narrator admits that the more he talked with Frieder about why he first tried to kill himself, the paler the question became, until it almost disappeared. He finds no answer. He also cannot know whether Frieder’s reasons at the later, successful suicide were the same as before. That uncertainty guards the story against turning Frieder’s death into a single decipherable motive.

Narrative Significance

The episode is framed through the narrator’s first-person experience, but the article’s account of it must distinguish that voice from the novel’s fixed English names: the narrator is not named in the supplied evidence, while Frieder, Vera, Harry, and Pauline are. Within the scene, the movement from the snowy ascent to the tunnel and the apparent afterlife follows the narrator’s altered perception rather than an external confirmation of events. Its sequence matters: the view of family lights, the dwindling glow, the unnoticed cold, and Frieder’s arrival make a gradual passage from isolation toward imagined reunion.

That progression is sharpened by the novel’s recurring uncertainty about suicide. Frieder’s distinction between not wanting to die and not wanting to continue living is neither a resolution nor a diagnosis; the narrator’s fear for him repeatedly exceeds what he can know. The snow-night scene reverses that position. The narrator, who has tried to interpret Frieder’s silences and moods, now becomes the person whose danger cannot be confidently read from outside. His vision offers the comfort of being met by Frieder, but it also reveals how close the narrator has come to disappearing from the lives whose lights he watched below.

The episode does not close with an answer to the narrator’s suffering or to the meaning of Frieder’s death. Elsewhere, the narrator reasons that choosing not to kill himself today leaves tomorrow open, while killing himself today would foreclose the possibility of choosing otherwise. That later reflection gives the snowy night a stark retrospective contrast: the imagined flight into an afterlife belongs to a moment when the narrator’s perception of cold and danger is failing, while the later thought insists on the value of leaving possibilities available. The vision remains a powerful image of grief and near-death, not proof that Frieder came back or that the narrator’s crisis was resolved.