Jonny

Jonny’s bullying of Oskar is part of a wider pattern of intimidation, but it is not invulnerable: when Oskar finally strikes back, Jonny is left with a serious ear injury, and their familiar balance of power begins to shift.

Family and social position

Jonny’s bond with his older brother Jimmy is close but uneasy. He likes spending time with Jimmy when Jimmy’s more threatening friends are not around. Years earlier, some of those associates came to the family home and used Jonny to pass on a threat: unless Jimmy paid them, they would put his head in a vice. Jonny delivered the message; Jimmy acknowledged it, and money later disappeared from their mother’s wallet, provoking an angry scene. Jonny is thus exposed to intimidation not only as a bully but also as a younger brother drawn into the dangers surrounding Jimmy.

The family’s circumstances have changed. Jimmy is home less often, and the household has grown more crowded after their mother had another child with a new partner. Jonny and Jimmy share a father, who works on an oil rig off the coast of Norway and has begun sending regular child support, along with extra money to make up for the past. For the first time Jonny can remember, money is no longer the family’s constant concern. That relief does not erase the tensions in the household, or Jonny’s sense that his place in it has shifted.

At a pizzeria on Blackeberg’s main square, Jonny and Jimmy share a meal after Jimmy has argued with their mother. Jimmy folds his pizza into a large roll and eats it with both hands; Jonny eats in his usual way, but privately thinks he might copy his brother the next time they eat together. The small detail conveys Jonny’s admiration through imitation rather than declaration. Jimmy also notices the bandage on Jonny’s ear and says their mother believes the damage may leave him unable to hear. Jonny answers that the doctors do not yet know whether he will recover.

Jimmy offers to take Oskar on with help from some of his friends. Jonny imagines how frightened Oskar would be if he showed up with Jimmy and the men from Råcksta, but decides not to involve them because that would make the situation get out of hand. The fantasy of borrowed force reveals both his wish to regain control and his awareness that escalation has consequences. Jimmy then gives him a thin photo album their father brought by the previous week. Its pictures show their father with the children years earlier, including Jonny as a small boy watching Jimmy beside him. Jonny’s care for the album gives his connection to his absent father a tangible form.

Bullying and the first reversal

At school, Jonny operates within a group that knows when authority is near. Fernando Avila, the boys’ gym teacher, commands the class’s respect: even an unruly group lines up properly when he requires it, and Jonny, Micke, and Tomas do not dare misbehave in his presence. During one such lineup, Johan steps out, glances toward the school building, and mocks Avila with a Nazi salute and a feigned Spanish accent, joking that the day’s activity is a fire drill with ropes. The episode places Jonny in a school culture where authority can restrain the bullies, but where students also turn that authority into material for ridicule.

Jonny’s own taunting becomes physical after gym class. He slips a noose made from a jump rope over Oskar and calls him Piggy, handling the rope as if Oskar were an animal to be ridden. Oskar turns, takes hold of the rope, and pulls its ends from Jonny’s grip. Even before their more consequential confrontation, the attempted humiliation meets resistance rather than simple submission.

Later, on the hill, Jonny and Micke wave to Oskar as he falls behind. Oskar does not wave back; instead, he takes a large branch from the path and strips away its small twigs as he walks. Near the ice, Jonny threatens to kill him if he does not put the stick down. When Jonny comes within a little more than arm’s length, Oskar swings. Jonny ducks the first movement, but the heavy end of the branch strikes his ear and knocks him onto the ice. Micke backs away, then runs for shore as Oskar advances with the stick before stopping. Blood runs between Jonny’s fingers where he holds his ear. Oskar crouches beside him, wanting to apologize because he had not meant to hurt him so badly, but the sight of Jonny interrupts the apology. The encounter turns the bullying dynamic into a physical reversal: Jonny’s threat has not prevented Oskar from fighting back, and Jonny carries the injury that will make the reversal visible at school.

Injury, shame, and escalation

For several weeks after the fight on the ice, Jonny has to endure baaing and jokes about his clothes. At home, his four-year-old half-brother Kalle brings him a wooden block wrapped in the first page of the evening paper. Jonny sends him away, says he is not in the mood, and locks his door. Looking again at the photo album of his father, he hears his stepfather yell at Kalle for ruining the paper. When Jonny unwraps the gift, the block shows a close-up of a sheep; he turns it in his fingers and chuckles, his skin taut around his injured ear. He puts the album in his gym bag, thinking it will be safer at school, and turns again to the question of what to do about Oskar. The moment sets childhood tenderness beside the hardening feud: Jonny rejects his little brother, then privately accepts the odd gift, before returning to thoughts of retaliation.

When Oskar returns to school, Micke’s account of what happened has already circulated. The students gathered outside the classroom make way as Oskar approaches, and Jonny arrives after the lesson has begun. His ear is dark red and swollen, but uncovered. He avoids looking at Oskar or anyone else; Oskar reads the redness in Jonny’s cheeks as shame. Jonny slips the photo album into his desk. The injured ear, plainly visible, records the reversal in the school’s social space, while the album remains a private possession he keeps close.

The conflict later becomes a coordinated attempt to kill Oskar. At a station, Jonny and Tomas act together: Tomas trips Oskar as he runs from the train, and Jonny sits on his back. They drag him toward the white line above the tracks as a train approaches. Jonny tells him, “You’re going to die now, you understand.” Oskar realizes that they mean to carry it through as they force his upper body out over the tracks. The scene is not another bout of schoolyard taunting; Jonny turns the threat of violence into an immediate effort to place Oskar in the path of a train.

The attack at the swimming pool is another joint assault, this time with Jonny’s older brother Jimmy. While Oskar is pressed into a corner of the pool, Jonny grips his hair and forces his head back against the tiled ledge, banging it there as water splashes into his ears. He identifies the attack as vengeance for Jimmy, saying, “That’s my brother, you fucker.” Jimmy crouches nearby with a stiletto. Jonny’s bullying has now drawn his family into the violence: the brother he admires is not merely a source of borrowed intimidation but a participant beside him, while Oskar is held in the water and left at their mercy.

Grievance and retaliation

After Oskar sets fire to the desks, Jonny is in his bedroom while Jimmy speaks with Johan by telephone. Jonny sits on the bed, rubbing a tassel from the bedspread between his fingers. Jimmy asks whether half the classroom burned down; Jonny nods. He then says that everyone in the class hates Oskar. Jimmy presses Johan about an earlier suggestion, asking whether Oskar would respond to what he had called “some paper.” Johan lowers his head, embarrassed. The exchange shows Jonny’s conflict being discussed and shaped by others around him: Jimmy questions the proposed response, while Jonny presents Oskar as a target of wider class hostility. Set beside the later attack at the pool, the conversation traces how school resentment and family involvement converge in the violence against Oskar.

Narrative Role

Jonny complicates a simple division between bully and victim. The threat he once carried from Jimmy’s associates shows him exposed to intimidation within his own family’s orbit, while his treatment of Oskar makes him an agent of intimidation at school. These positions coexist rather than cancel each other out: the photo album and his attachment to Jimmy reveal a capacity for tenderness and dependence, but they do not soften the violence he directs at Oskar. The swollen ear becomes a visible marker of that instability. It registers the moment Jonny’s dominance can be challenged, yet the later attacks show that the reversal does not end the conflict. Through Jonny, the novel presents bullying not as a fixed status but as a shifting exercise of force, sustained by group loyalty, family ties, and the prospect of retaliation.