The chain reaction of revenge

The chain reaction of revenge is the novel’s account of violence continuing after its originating moment has been forgotten. Its central image is a snowball set in motion in a tool shed at Sigtuna College for the Humanities: the people who began it may have moved on, but the person caught up in its path remains frozen in the consequences. The metaphor links an old humiliation to later acts by Sofia Zetterlund and Victoria, showing revenge not as a single, contained response but as a force that gathers momentum, crosses time, and traps people who cannot see where its effects will lead.

The old wound and the snowball

The chain begins long before its consequences are understood. The recollection places its starting point a quarter of a lifetime earlier, in the tool shed at Sigtuna College for the Humanities. The snowball image makes the relationship between origin and aftermath vivid: a seemingly small occurrence gains force as it travels, while the people at its beginning may not know what they have set moving. The episode is remembered as something its makers could have dismissed as an innocent game, one that began and ended in the shed. For the person swept into it, however, the same event does not end there.

That contrast is central to the concept. The people responsible may forget and continue with their lives; the injured person remains caught at the point of harm. Time passes in the outside world, but it does not automatically loosen the wound. The narrative describes the sufferer as frozen in the moment, for whom time has no healing effect. Revenge therefore emerges from an injury whose duration is radically unequal: what may have been brief or negligible to its instigators becomes an enduring reality for the person who carries it.

A divided self gives the past new actions

The chain reaction also operates through the relation between Sofia Zetterlund and Victoria. Sofia has adapted in ways Victoria could not, while Victoria has hidden deep within her. But Victoria has not disappeared: she has waited for the moment when Sofia would be forced to let her out to prevent herself from sinking. Victoria has spent decades trying to make Sofia recognize that she, rather than Sofia, holds the key; Sofia has only occasionally listened, and has instead tried to erase Victoria from memory.

The text connects that intermittent influence to specific actions. One instance is Sofia’s encounter with the whining boy by the river, whom she got to shut up. Another is her taking care of Lars Magnus Pettersson. These moments matter to the chain not because the passage supplies a full account of every consequence, but because it shows Victoria’s influence entering Sofia’s actions despite Sofia’s effort to suppress her. The past does not return only as recollection: it becomes active through a self that has been concealed but not extinguished.

This structure makes revenge difficult to separate from survival. Victoria waits until Sofia is close to sinking; letting Victoria out is presented as necessary to stop that collapse. Yet the same release brings the past into the present through acts that continue its effects. The divided self thus becomes a means by which the chain can travel forward even when one part of the person has tried to deny its source.

Revenge multiplies without the avenger’s knowledge

The avenger cannot see the full reach of what she is doing. The narrative states that she cannot see that her revenge is itself a chain reaction. This limitation creates a sharp irony: revenge may feel like a purposeful answer to an injury, but its consequences continue beyond the avenger’s field of vision. The people who set the original snowball in motion may have forgotten it; in turn, the person caught up in its continuation may not understand how far her own actions will carry it.

The image of hardened ice gives this repetition a bodily and emotional form. Hate does not thaw. Instead, it hardens into sharp ice crystals surrounding the whole self. Revenge promises action against the past, but the image describes a person increasingly enclosed by it. The force meant to answer an injury becomes a structure of confinement: the avenger is not outside the chain, directing it freely, but trapped within the frozen moment from which it began.

The passage sets this condition against the possibility of forgiveness. The nightmare figure understands that forgiveness might free both herself and those forgiven, yet years of trying to forget have failed. Forgetting and forgiveness are not treated as equivalent: one has been attempted repeatedly without success, while the other is imagined as a possible release. The chain persists because the wound cannot simply be erased, and because revenge does not undo what happened. Its repeated movement can preserve the injury rather than resolve it.

The journey toward release

The final movement gives the chain a personal, immediate consequence. The figure stands in the evening near Djurgården, where the air is damp after successive showers and cries rise from a roller coaster. She brushes herself off, pauses, takes a deep breath, and remembers why she is there: she has a task and knows what she must do. The scene does not explain every consequence of that task, but frames it as the next deliberate step in a journey she believes will free her forever and require her to burn all her bridges.

A childhood memory offers a contrasting image of refuge. When little, she clutched her dog and looked into its eyes until a miniature world, usually a beach, opened for her to explore before she fell asleep. Now she hugs the dog again, but she is not going to sleep. The remembered refuge sits beside a changed understanding of safety: she had thought no one could harm her if she held everything inside and played along, trying to be smarter, as though victory meant destroying others. The journey marks a break with that former strategy, though the chain’s full aftermath remains beyond the passage.

The concept’s force lies in this unresolved tension between release and repetition. The journey is presented as a way to become free, while the image of revenge insists that actions already set in motion do not remain neatly behind the person who began them. The forgotten tool-shed episode and the present task belong to one long causal movement, even though those who started it may have treated it as finished. In that movement, revenge is both an attempt to answer harm and a means by which harm continues.