Caterpillar souls

Caterpillar souls are the small, vulnerable forms in which the human element of the dead becomes visible to Flora and, in a separate encounter, to David Zetterberg. They are neither simply ordinary insects nor complete human beings: the novel presents them as a form through which an otherwise imperceptible passage between bodily death and whatever lies beyond can be seen. Their contrasting fates—some lost after their hosts are destroyed, one apparently changing into a butterfly—make the image central to the book’s uncertainty about death and release.

Nature and Appearance

Flora understands the caterpillars not as the entirety of the people they represent, but as the human element within them made visible in a comprehensible form. That qualification matters. What appears to be a small creature is also a way of perceiving something that has no straightforward human shape; the caterpillar offers a body for a reality that would otherwise remain unseen. The novel therefore gives it a double status, at once physically vivid within Flora’s experience and a perceptible image of something beyond ordinary sight.

The distinction is sharpened by Flora’s encounter with her double. The other Flora is not, in her understanding, literally her twin, and is not a being whose nature can be explained in human terms. It is a force that takes a form meaningful to the person seeing it. Hooks are its constant feature, but even they are images rather than material objects: their comprehensible task is to catch and collect. The caterpillars belong to this same difficult territory between what can be seen and what can be explained. Their appearance makes a hidden process legible without making that process fully knowable.

The Caterpillars After the Fire

After a bonfire has consumed the bodies, Flora initially mistakes the emerging shapes for fingers struggling free of the flames. She recognizes them as white caterpillars instead. The smell is unbearable even through her face mask, and she retreats a couple of metres. The scene forces a change in scale: what had been a mass of burned bodies becomes, for her, a number of distinct small beings trying to emerge from it.

Only seven caterpillars appear, although there had been around fifteen people to begin with. Their emergence does not restore those people or give them a way back into ordinary life. The caterpillars wriggle after their hosts have been destroyed, with nowhere to go. Flora knows what they are, but recognition does not give her power over their fate. She thinks of them as lost, and understands that their fear and turning away have left them in that condition.

As Flora watches, the caterpillars swell and change from pale forms to pink and then red. She hears faint screams of anguish as they realize they are being pulled inexorably toward The Other Place. The sequence makes their helplessness visible through changes in the body: growth, stretching membrane, intensifying colour, and increasingly audible cries. Yet Flora also knows that this is not literally happening in the ordinary physical sense. Her watching makes an invisible drama perceptible, a drama she understands as ancient as the human race.

The scene ends not in rescue but in disappearance. Each caterpillar bursts; translucent fluid runs out and evaporates in the heat among the scorched bones, while the screams fade. The bodies have been burned, and the small forms emerging from them cannot survive as independent creatures in this world. Their passage is rendered through a gruesome physical image, but its destination remains beyond description. Flora can witness the loss without altering it.

David’s Encounter and the Butterfly

A different outcome appears when David wakes in Magnus’s bed with his arms outstretched and a white caterpillar curled on his stomach. The preceding vision of Eva Zetterberg—on a lawn, beside a canal and a boat—has contracted and vanished as he opens his eyes. At his bedside he senses the presence associated with Death: cheap perfume, a hint of pink, and a hand adorned with colourful bracelets and hooks. He recognizes the figure as his own image of Death, the woman from the grocery store.

David reaches over the caterpillar to protect it. The hooks stop short of his hand because, as the scene makes explicit, they cannot touch the living. The caterpillar’s plea reaches him not as ordinary spoken conversation but through contact: it wriggles against his palm, and the plea seems to pass through his skin and flesh into his bones. David refuses to let go. As the caterpillar swells beneath his hand, the hooks withdraw and Eva’s voice grows weaker, separated from him by accumulating darkness. His refusal does not preserve their communication; the plea fades even as he continues to hold on.

The hooks return, and one pierces the caterpillar. But the puncture opens a crack in what David had taken to be an insect. A tiny head emerges, and he sees that it has been a pupa. A butterfly works its way out; the dry shell falls away and dissolves. After resting motionless on the hook, it flies upward and disappears through the ceiling. The hooked hand vanishes, and the whining sound abates. The transformation does not explain where Eva has gone or establish exactly what the butterfly means, but it sets this encounter apart from the caterpillars that burst beside the burned bodies.

Meaning and Limits of the Image

The caterpillar image joins visibility to helplessness. Flora’s perception grants the dead a form she can recognize, yet the form does not give her command of what happens next. At the bonfire, seeing the caterpillars means seeing their distress and their movement toward The Other Place; it does not make their passage reversible. The scene’s visceral detail and its insistence that the drama is also invisible hold physical horror and metaphysical uncertainty together.

David’s encounter offers a counterpoint rather than a complete answer. His hands can shelter the caterpillar from the hooks for a time, but his protection cannot stop its swelling, the fading voice, or the return of the hooks. The emergence of the butterfly introduces a change of form where Flora had witnessed bursting and loss. Because the text leaves the destination unexplained, the metamorphosis remains an image of possible release, not a settled account of what follows death. Across both scenes, caterpillar souls make the boundary between bodies, perception, and an unknowable afterlife briefly visible, while refusing to make it secure or fully understood.