Rabbits

Rabbits are represented through Balthazar, a small animal whose presence links ordinary acts of care to the story’s uncanny crossings of consciousness and, finally, to sudden violence. His dependence gives Magnus someone to protect; his apparent animal perspective briefly unsettles the boundary between human and nonhuman experience. When Eva kills him, the rabbit’s death becomes an immediate source of grief and a rupture in the family’s fragile effort to care for her.

Identity and Place in the Narrative

Balthazar is the rabbit most clearly identified in the narrative. He appears alongside Magnus during a public gathering: when David offers to take him, Magnus shakes his head and grips the basket more tightly. The gesture is small, but it shows the boy’s attachment before the story makes that attachment explicit. David notices that Magnus’s arms may be tired, yet does not insist on taking the rabbit. Around them, an official presentation gives way to a neurologist’s acknowledgment that people near the reliving can read one another’s thoughts. Balthazar is thus present at a moment when the extraordinary is being discussed publicly, while Magnus’s protective hold on him remains intimate and physical.

The rabbits are not developed as a separate group with a history or a sustained point of view. Instead, Balthazar concentrates the narrative’s attention on animal vulnerability: he can be held, carried in a pocket, comforted, and harmed. His mother appears through the boy’s perception of him rather than as an independently described animal. That narrow focus matters. The rabbit is not only an emblem of Magnus’s feelings; the scene grants his experience a brief, distinct presence, even as it remains filtered through the human characters and the novel’s unusual shared consciousness.

Perception and Care

David’s perception of Balthazar becomes literal in an uncanny way. He recognizes that the enlarged yellow stalks before him are hay, distorted because he himself has become very small. He is lying in the hay beside a warm body whose heart beats rapidly: Balthazar’s mother. The passage identifies this as the rabbit’s consciousness forming a backdrop to David’s own. The ordinary setting of hay and a nest is made strange by scale, while the rabbit’s bodily surroundings become perceptible from within a human mind. Balthazar’s animal life is not explained in general terms; it is conveyed through this specific, disorienting encounter.

Care remains physical even as perception crosses species boundaries. David and Sture crouch in a small circle, shielding themselves from the surrounding world, and David takes Balthazar from his pocket to offer him to Magnus. Magnus holds the rabbit against his chest and stares into space. Sture’s jacket bears dark streaks of rabbit urine, a concrete trace of the animal’s presence amid the adults’ concern. The three remain crouched together for half a minute before tears rise in Magnus’s eyes. Their close arrangement turns a public search into a private moment of attention, with Balthazar held at its center.

Magnus understands Balthazar’s distress as a wish to be with his mother. Sture answers with an account of young rabbits being driven away by their mothers and having to manage alone, adding that Balthazar was fortunate to have come to Magnus. David does not know whether this explanation is true, but recognizes that it soothes the boy. Magnus presses Balthazar more firmly to his chest and offers himself as the rabbit’s mother. The declaration calms Balthazar too: he stops struggling and rests in Magnus’s hands. Sture nevertheless decides it is probably best to take him, and puts him back in his pocket. The comfort is real within the scene, but it does not erase the difference between a child’s promise and an animal’s dependence.

Balthazar and Magnus

The relationship between Magnus and Balthazar is defined through holding, protection, and attempted consolation rather than through extended conversation. Magnus resists David’s offer to take the rabbit, watches him closely, and later accepts him against his chest. When Balthazar seems to want his mother, Magnus does not dismiss the apparent need; he answers it with a promise of care. The scene gives the boy a role he can understand and act upon, even while David remains uncertain about the explanation Sture offers.

Balthazar’s presence also accompanies Magnus during a visit to Eva. The rabbit crawls onto her belly while Magnus points him out and speaks to her. This quiet contact precedes the fatal reversal. The story does not establish that Balthazar’s movements carry a message or that Eva responds to him with deliberate intent. Instead, the familiar image of a rabbit on a person’s lap becomes the setting for an act no one present can undo. The earlier episode of comfort sharpens the contrast: Balthazar had seemed capable of settling in Magnus’s hands, but that tenderness offers no protection from what follows.

Death and Aftermath

As Magnus cries out, David hears a scream inside his head before the sound reaches his ears. He first associates it with Magnus, then recognizes that the internal scream comes from Balthazar. A second sound, like a bird’s cry, is followed by a light cracking noise. David lunges toward the bed, but arrives too late. The sequence makes the rabbit’s death perceptible first through sound and shared sensation, then through its physical consequences.

Balthazar’s body lies in Eva’s lap, while she holds his head in one hand and turns it toward her eye to examine it. His nose still twitches and his eyes stare; the legs of the headless body continue kicking as blood runs along a fold in the blanket and drips to the floor. The narration dwells on these separate, involuntary movements rather than allowing the violence to pass as a single action. The legs jerk once more and become still. Eva’s eye and the rabbit’s eye reflect one another, a disturbing image that holds her act and Balthazar’s remaining signs of life in the same frame. The passage supplies no explanation for why Eva does this, and does not convert the killing into a reasoned choice.

Magnus responds with hatred and strikes Eva’s arm and shoulder, flailing until he tears loose the cables attached to her head. David takes him from behind, locks him in a tight embrace, and carries him out of the apartment, whispering words that do not comfort him. Balthazar’s death therefore has an immediate consequence beyond the rabbit’s own destruction: it breaks the fragile scene of contact between Magnus and Eva and leaves David trying to remove the child from its aftermath. The rabbit’s brief arc moves from being carried and soothed to being violently killed, making animal vulnerability inseparable from the human grief that follows.