Oskar sets Jonny and Thomas’s desks on fire

Oskar’s arson attack on Jonny’s and Tomas’s desks turns the school’s ordinary classroom into the setting for a private act of retaliation—and turns a controlled plan into a fire that frightens even its maker. The scene gives his resistance to school bullying a decisive, material form, but its outcome is not triumph: the blaze grows beyond what he expected, and he runs as the alarm summons a school community that is not there.

Causes and Setting

The action follows the prospect of Oskar returning to school, where Jonny and Tomas remain associated with the threat of renewed bullying. The remembered image of Jonny forcing Oskar’s cheeks into a smile and demanding that he squeal like a pig makes the violence he anticipates specific: it is humiliation enacted on his face and voice. Against that background, the desks are not neutral pieces of furniture. They belong to the classmates who have made school a place of coercion, and Oskar’s plan directs its force at their property rather than at them in person.

He approaches the school at night, when it is largely dark and its yard is marked by a single cold spotlight. Slush covers the cracked Ping-Pong tables, while lit windows indicate evening classes. Those classes matter practically: a side door has been left unlocked, giving Oskar a way into the building. The familiar school is altered by the hour. In the empty corridors and classroom, the setting feels unreal to him, as though the desks belong to a ghostly school operating alongside the waking one. The contrast between the daytime institution he fears and the silent nighttime rooms makes his entry feel like a temporary seizure of space.

Preparation and Choice

Before going to the classroom, Oskar opens the box of money beneath a rug, searches among the mixed banknotes, and retrieves a plastic bottle. He returns to the apartment for matches. These steps establish that the fire is planned rather than an impulsive response to a sudden encounter: he gathers the materials, chooses a time when the school is quiet, and uses the unlocked door to reach the room without drawing attention.

Inside, Oskar takes time to look at the desks and experience the classroom in peace. He opens Jonny’s desk and sprays it with several quarts of T-Rod, then does the same to Tomas’s. At Micke’s desk, however, he stops and decides not to include it. That pause gives the attack a boundary: Oskar is not indiscriminately setting every desk alight. The distinction is brief but consequential, showing him making a choice among his classmates even as he prepares to commit a destructive act against two of them.

He also gathers his own belongings. He takes his copy of Firestarter, an exercise book containing a story he likes, and his favorite pen, placing them in his schoolbag. Then he makes a last circuit of the classroom and enjoys being there undisturbed. The scene thus holds retaliation beside a quieter wish: for a moment, the room can be his without anyone tormenting him. His imagined ghostly presence gives that brief freedom an eerie quality, but it does not soften the practical care with which he prepares to leave with the things that matter to him.

The Fire Takes Control

Oskar returns to Jonny’s desk to take out the matches, then realizes the open desks need to be held up if they are to keep burning. He fetches two rough-hewn wooden rulers from a shelf and props one desk open with each. The improvised supports turn the desks into gaping, hungry shapes in his imagination; they also reveal the plan’s dependence on small practical details. He wants the lids to remain raised so the fire will not be smothered when he lets go.

He lights a match, waits until its flame is large and clear, and drops it. The fire catches with a sudden rush. Rather than consuming the T-Rod slowly, as Oskar had expected, it flares up so violently that he springs back. A purple tail of flame leaps from the desk and licks his face; his eyes sting, and the desk becomes a bonfire reaching toward the ceiling. The reversal arrives almost immediately: the fire meant to be a targeted attack has become too large for the scale he imagined.

The spreading blaze makes the classroom itself part of the destruction. Large paper letters hanging above Jonny’s desk break loose and fall; some burn on the floor, while the other half swings onto Tomas’s desk, which catches fire in turn. The scene’s chain of events—one desk igniting, the garland falling, the second desk flaring—shows how the attack escapes the neat division Oskar had made between targets. The danger is no longer confined to the two desks, and he flees from the classroom with his schoolbag bouncing against his hip.

Escape and Consequences

As he runs down the corridor, Oskar fears that the whole school may be involved. The bells begin ringing, and only after he has gone some distance down the stairs does he recognize them as the fire alarm. Outside, the schoolyard bell rings fiercely to summon students who are not present. Its call gathers the school’s imagined ghosts and follows him for part of the way home, joining the uncanny atmosphere of his solitary nighttime visit to the very real consequences of the fire.

Oskar does not relax until he reaches the old Konsum grocery store and can no longer hear the bell. He then walks calmly for the rest of the journey. At home, the damage visible on his own body is small but concrete: the tops of his eyelashes have been singed, and they break off when he touches them. The scene establishes his escape and the alarm, but does not show the fire’s eventual extent or the school’s material damage; those outcomes should not be inferred from his fear that the whole building might burn.

The episode’s force lies in the distance between Oskar’s controlled preparations and the fire’s uncontrolled scale. He chooses the targets, spares Micke’s desk, retrieves his books, and rigs the desks to keep their lids open; yet the flames rise toward the ceiling, spread to Tomas’s desk, and send him running. Retaliation gives way to immediate self-preservation. At the same time, the school’s alarm transforms his private nighttime act into a public emergency, even though the students it calls are absent. The burning classroom is therefore both an escalation of Oskar’s conflict with his bullies and a moment when his attempt to take control produces a danger he cannot manage.