The cycle of violence and revenge

The cycle of violence and revenge is a recurring pattern in which betrayal and harm do not remain in the past but shape later choices and identities. The novel makes the pattern explicit through the myth of Oedipus, Madeleine’s understanding of the Bergman family, and a wartime memory that traces a lifetime of actions back to a childhood betrayal. Together, these strands present repetition not as an abstract fate alone, but as a history carried forward by people struggling to survive or escape it.

Myth and the Logic of Recurrence

The novel invokes Oedipus as an ancient story of revenge. As a child, Oedipus is the subject of a prophecy: he will kill his father, the king of Thebes, and marry his mother. His parents try to evade the prediction by ordering his death, but the person charged with carrying it out takes pity on him and raises him as his own son. Unaware of his origins and the prophecy, Oedipus later kills his father and marries his mother. The effort to prevent the foretold future instead becomes part of the chain of events that brings it about.

The account reduces this story to a sequence of murder, betrayal, and revenge, then draws out its governing principle: everything is cyclical. The myth offers a framework for reading the novel’s family histories, where attempts to escape the past do not necessarily end its influence. The pattern is especially troubling because later actions can reproduce the very damage they are meant to overcome.

Madeleine and the Family Circle

Madeleine sees the Bergman family as a snake swallowing its own tail and no longer wants to participate in its vicious circle. Her recognition gives the image a personal and immediate meaning: the family is not merely a source of inherited history but a system of repeated harm from which she wants to separate herself.

Her earlier encounter with Victoria Bergman at Gröna Lund shows how misunderstanding and haste can carry the pattern forward. Madeleine believed that the boy holding her mother’s hand was her half-brother, and acted on impulse before she had properly understood the situation. When she later finds Victoria again near Skanstull Bridge, she cannot bring herself to approach her. The contrast between the impulsive earlier encounter and this hesitation marks a change in Madeleine’s response, even though it does not by itself free her from the family’s past.

Watching Victoria also confronts Madeleine with a possible future. She notices that Victoria’s heels are chafed, as her own are, and sees her mother limp as if walking on glass. In that image Madeleine glimpses herself twenty years later: thin, brittle, unable to relax, and wandering without direction. The recognition turns resemblance into a warning. She can imagine herself repeating Victoria’s condition, following the same path rather than leaving it behind.

Following, Catching Up, and the Past

Madeleine understands her life through the recurring image of following. She feels she has always walked behind someone, arriving a few steps late and living each moment after it has passed. Even when she catches up with the people ahead of her and kills them, she has not managed to leave them behind. They remain in front of her or at the edges of her awareness, as indistinct and disturbing presences.

This account complicates the idea that violence ends when its immediate target is gone. In Madeleine’s perception, killing does not produce distance or release; the people remain psychologically present. Her sense of belatedness also echoes the novel’s larger pattern of actions returning from the past: she catches up only to find that the past has not become past. The image of the limp and the imagined older self gives this repetition a bodily and temporal dimension, while the recurring figures at the edge of her vision show how unfinished history can continue to occupy the present.

Betrayal and a Life Traced Backward

A separate recollection gives the cycle a historical setting. A woman remembers that she turned in her own family and that, as she understands it, everything began there. Both of her brothers belonged to the group and were alive when they knelt at the edge of a ravine and were shot. In the last minutes of her life, she kneels in the same place, joining the present moment to the earlier one. She carries a small wooden thumbscrew in her pocket; as she removes it, the pain in her finger returns. The gesture places an object and a bodily sensation within a memory in which past and present coincide.

Her account locates that betrayal within shifting systems of political persecution. She had been part of an informant community under Stalin’s dictatorship, where friends became enemies and even committed Stalinists were unsafe. When the Germans arrived, the roles reversed: people were required to inform on Jews and Communists. She describes her own action as doing what others did in order to adapt and survive. Yet she also recognizes the unequal danger of that strategy: survival was impossible for her as a Jewish girl, whether considered a mamzer or not, but possible if she could live as a strong young man.

Concealing her physical gender was difficult, especially in Dachau. The account says that protection from the guard commander made it possible; to him, she was an Ohrwürmer, both male and female. These details show survival as a precarious negotiation with a violent order, not a clean escape from it. Her final kneeling returns her to the place of her brothers’ deaths, and she understands the events of her life as traceable to those autumn days.

Meaning and Limits of Escape

The novel’s different strands do not make violence inevitable in a simple, unchanging sense. Madeleine recognizes the family pattern and wants to leave it; the woman in the wartime recollection interprets her past through the pressures of informing, persecution, and adaptation. But recognition does not erase what has happened. Madeleine’s attempt to catch up with others leaves them still present, and the woman’s final act of kneeling makes an earlier scene recur in the place where it began.

The cycle therefore joins personal repetition to family and political histories without making them identical. The Oedipus myth supplies the stark pattern of attempted escape turning into fulfillment; Madeleine’s family image expresses the wish to break from inherited harm; and the wartime recollection shows how a single act, made under pressure, can become the point from which an entire life is understood. Across these contexts, the past continues to direct the present until it is faced, though facing it does not guarantee release.