Traumatic memory and repression

Traumatic memory and repression in the novel are shown not as a sealed archive waiting to be opened, but as a fractured and unreliable sense of personal history. Sofia Zetterlund discovers that memories associated with Victoria Bergman belong to the life she has tried not to recognize as her own. Their return does not immediately restore a coherent past: it unsettles the boundary between the two identities and leaves Sofia confronting both what she remembers and what she cannot yet accept.

Memory, ownership, and the missing past

Sofia’s first task is to locate the point at which her memories become hers rather than Victoria’s. The question makes recollection a problem of ownership as much as accuracy. She cannot simply retrieve an event and place it securely in a personal chronology; she must ask which self experienced it and whether the distinction between the selves can hold.

Her uncertainty reaches back to adolescence and early adulthood. She wonders whether Sofia was already present at Sigtuna, and whether she travelled by train across Europe with Hannah and Jessica. Those images remain hazy. In contrast, her memories begin to acquire logical order and clarity only during her university years, when she was twenty. The contrast suggests that an apparently continuous life may conceal a break in the ability to organize experience: a remembered image is not the same thing as an integrated personal history.

The change is also marked by Sofia’s new awareness of absence. Before, the gaps in her memory were so familiar that her mind did not register them as gaps at all. Now she perceives them as black holes in her life. Repression is therefore not represented only by inaccessible events; it also shapes the person’s sense of what counts as a complete life. Once the omissions become visible, they acquire weight, although visibility alone does not fill them.

The return of childhood memories

Victoria’s childhood memories do not arrive in date order, like photographs sorted into folders. They surface haphazardly, sometimes without any apparent external prompt and sometimes after an object or a conversation draws Sofia back into the past. This pattern makes recollection unpredictable rather than voluntary. The present does not reliably summon a chosen memory; an ordinary encounter may instead become the route by which an earlier experience returns.

Sofia’s attention to the pale scars on her arm gives this conflict a physical marker. She recognizes them as Victoria’s and recalls that Victoria used a razor blade or pieces of broken glass behind Aunt Elsa’s house in Dala-Floda. The marks connect the present body to a past Sofia has not fully claimed. They do not, by themselves, settle the question of identity; instead, they make the division between remembered self and present self harder to maintain.

Sofia hopes she might avoid confronting these memories and accepting them as her own. Her mind has tried to spare her from awareness of them, but the protection has not given her a stable life. Without memory, she understands herself as a shell. The image sharpens the cost of repression: it may keep painful material outside conscious awareness, yet it also deprives the self of substance and continuity.

Two identities and the difficulty of integration

The return of memory does not produce immediate reconciliation between Sofia and Victoria. Sofia realizes that integration cannot happen while Victoria continues to push her away and loathes the part of herself represented by Sofia. Sofia, in turn, resists accepting the violent acts associated with Victoria. Their estrangement is reciprocal, and neither identity can simply absorb the other without confronting what that identification would mean.

The two are described as having no common denominator. That formulation captures the impasse rather than resolving it: memory may establish that the lives are connected, while emotional and moral resistance keeps them divided. Recovered knowledge is therefore not equivalent to acceptance. The past can become more present without becoming easier to own, and recognition does not erase the conflict between the person who remembers and the person whose history is being remembered.

Speaking, trust, and the limits of disclosure

Other scenes place Sofia in settings where conversation depends on establishing a point of contact. At her office in Mariatorget, Samuel Bai initially seems reserved and uninterested. When Sofia proposes speaking Krio rather than English, he becomes more communicative. The exchange does not establish a particular memory or disclose its contents, but it shows how the conditions of speech can change when the conversation meets someone on more familiar ground.

A later encounter offers a related, carefully limited contrast. When Linnea Lundström arrives, Sofia is surprised by how quickly she has gained the girl’s trust. This moment does not prove that trust restores memory or resolves trauma. It does, however, place the possibility of disclosure within a relationship rather than treating it as a purely internal act. Across these scenes, the novel distinguishes the return of memory from the ability to speak about it: recall may be involuntary, while communication depends on circumstances and connection.

The concept’s significance lies in that unresolved gap. Sofia’s growing awareness makes the missing past visible, but visibility leaves questions of ownership, integration, and acceptance open. Memory returns in fragments, the body and present-day encounters can connect those fragments to an earlier life, and the divided identities remain in conflict over what the past means. Repression protects Sofia from recognition only at the cost of a coherent self; recovering the past is necessary to that coherence, but it does not make the recovery simple or complete.