Guilt, good and evil, and victimhood

Guilt, good and evil, and victimhood form a moral problem that the novel refuses to settle with a simple division between innocent victims and guilty perpetrators. Through Victoria Bergman’s reflections on violence, her response to Samuel Bai, and her childhood judgment of Martin’s father, it shows how the desire to identify evil can be shaped by trauma, revenge, and assumptions about who deserves blame. The distinction matters because Victoria can recognize another person as a victim while still acting violently herself; it also matters because her own sense of justice once turned an ordinary act into evidence of collective guilt.

Moral Boundaries and the Growth of Evil

Victoria’s thoughts turn to the boundary separating socially acceptable fantasies, impulses, and desires from those that become destructive. Her concern is not only whether a particular action is wrong, but who has the authority to draw that boundary and how anyone can know when an impulse has crossed it. In this framing, evil is not necessarily visible from the outside or confined to people already marked as wicked. It can develop within an apparently healthy person or organism, like a disease growing where outward appearance gives no warning. The thought is associated with Victoria’s speech, though the narrative leaves open whether Karl Lundström may have expressed the comparison instead. That uncertainty keeps the idea from functioning as a settled doctrine attributed to one speaker: it enters the scene as a thought whose ownership itself is not entirely secure.

The disease image makes evil an internal possibility rather than a separate species of person. Yet that possibility complicates judgment. If destructive impulses can grow within someone who appears normal, then outward respectability cannot prove innocence; if boundaries depend on interpretation, the act of condemning another person may also reveal the judge’s own beliefs and desires. The novel does not supply a neutral rule that resolves this difficulty. Instead, Victoria’s later conduct makes the question personal: she considers whether guilt is necessary for evil at the same time that she prepares to harm someone she has already judged.

Victimhood, Innocence, and Revenge

In the scene with Samuel Bai, Victoria considers the terrible things he did as a child soldier in Sierra Leone and concludes that he is guilty of none of them. She sees him as a victim, and regards his intentions as once having been pure, without the revenge or jealousy that have driven her. Her judgment separates actions from responsibility by attending to the conditions under which they were carried out and to the person Samuel was as a child. The distinction does not erase the harm described; it changes how she understands the person who committed it. Samuel’s past actions do not, in her reasoning, make him inherently evil.

That recognition also throws Victoria’s own motives into relief. She identifies revenge and jealousy as forces that have driven her, rather than attributing her violence to an unexamined innocence. The contrast does not make her simply the opposite of Samuel: she can recognize his victimhood while remaining implicated in her own choices. When Samuel turns toward her, she acts with a concealed hammer. The narration places her moral question beside that action: she wonders whether a person can be evil without feeling guilt, or whether guilt is a precondition for evil. The act does not answer the question cleanly. Instead, it exposes the distance between judging evil in theory and exercising violence in practice, while making the absence or presence of guilt part of the problem rather than a reliable verdict.

Martin’s Father and Collective Blame

Victoria’s childhood memory offers a different test of guilt. She had been wrong about Martin’s father, who was an ordinary father washing his son. But the ten-year-old Victoria did not encounter the act as ordinary. She saw Martin’s father through the guilt of Bengt Bergman and other men, and read guilt in his eyes and in the way he touched her. In her reasoning, he was a man, and that alone seemed enough to confirm the conclusion. Analysis was unnecessary because she believed her own logic had already supplied the answer.

The adult reflection distinguishes what Martin’s father was doing from what Victoria believed the act meant. The gap is consequential: blame falls not on demonstrated wrongdoing by this particular man, but on his membership in a group that Victoria associates with the men who made her suffer. The memory therefore shows collective guilt operating as a substitute for examining an individual’s conduct. Her judgment has an intelligible source in the harm she has experienced, but the narrative also makes visible how that experience can turn an inference into certainty. The videotape label Sigtuna 84, which she reads as the memory closes, anchors the recollection in a concrete object without resolving the moral error it has exposed.

The Instability of Judgment

Taken together, these moments make victimhood and responsibility related but not interchangeable categories. Samuel’s childhood as a soldier allows Victoria to see that a person who has done terrible things may still be a victim; her judgment of Martin’s father shows how an injured person may also assign guilt unjustly. Neither recognition cancels the other. The novel asks readers to attend both to the circumstances that shape action and to the consequences of assigning blame, rather than treating suffering as automatic proof of innocence or apparent normality as proof of goodness.

Victoria’s own violence prevents her reflections from becoming detached moral commentary. Her question about guilt arrives at the point when she is acting against Samuel, so the distinction she seeks cannot be applied only to other people. Likewise, her memory of Martin’s father revises an earlier certainty without making the original pain disappear. Across these scenes, evil is presented less as a label that can be confidently attached to a fixed kind of person than as a difficult judgment entangled with motive, history, and power. The unresolved tension is central: acknowledging someone as a victim can deepen moral understanding, but it does not by itself settle responsibility; and the wish to punish evil can reproduce the very violence it claims to oppose.