Jocke

Jocke is Lacke’s closest friend, a man whose death leaves Lacke feeling that he has lost the one person he could depend on. His story reaches the reader indirectly: through Gosta’s account of the underpass, the later discovery of a body in the ice, and Lacke’s efforts to understand who killed him. Jocke’s absence is therefore both a personal bereavement and a mystery whose gaps shape the people left behind.

Identity and Introduction

Jocke is presented as an alcoholic and as one of the men in Lacke’s circle. The novel gives little biographical information about him beyond these circumstances. Instead, it establishes his importance through Lacke’s insistence that their friendship was unlike the looser bonds among the people around them. For Lacke, Jocke was the friend who did not let him down; the relationship mattered so much that, after Jocke’s death, ordinary assurances about friendship and loss seemed empty to him.

That emphasis makes Jocke’s characterization inseparable from Lacke’s grief. The reader first encounters the news of his death in company: Gosta tells the group that Jocke is dead, and Lacke covers his face, repeating that he knew it. The plain announcement gives way to the account of how Jocke disappeared. Jocke is not present to explain what happened or to be known in his own words; his life and death are reconstructed by witnesses and remembered through the person who misses him most.

Disappearance at the Underpass

Gosta’s account places Jocke’s disappearance at an underpass. A child had thrown a rock at the nearest streetlight, putting it out, and then hidden inside to wait. Jocke entered the underpass and did not come back out. The following morning, there was a faint imprint of a body among the dead leaves. These details establish the circumstances as Gosta understands them, but not as a complete eyewitness narrative: he says he could not make himself do something and had not exactly seen what happened. His certainty that Jocke was dead coexists with limits on what he can personally attest to.

That difference between certainty and direct knowledge leaves a crucial blank around Jocke’s final moments. The narrative identifies the darkened underpass, the waiting child, Jocke’s entry, and his failure to return, but it does not make Jocke’s perspective available. The evidence first offered to the group is indirect, and the missing body compounds the uncertainty. When Virginia later asks where Jocke is, Karlsson seizes on the question of the body. The practical doubt does not undo the group’s belief that Jocke has died; it shows how the absence of a body keeps the account unsettled.

Lacke’s Grief and Their Friendship

Jocke’s death exposes the depth of Lacke’s attachment. In the apartment, Lacke describes a friend who never lets a person down and says that the friendship was worth everything. He insists that he and Jocke were bound together, and rejects the others’ attempts to speak of loss as if their experiences were comparable. His speech turns from praise of Jocke to anger at the people around him, whom he calls empty and hollow. The anger is not evidence that Jocke was the only person Lacke knew; it shows how completely Jocke’s death has narrowed Lacke’s sense of what remains valuable.

Virginia tries to draw Lacke’s attention back to her, crouching beside him and saying his name. He rebuffs her and accuses her of not understanding him. Their exchange sets two different forms of closeness against each other: Virginia seeks recognition from Lacke in the present, while Lacke insists that the bond with Jocke cannot be replaced. His outburst is also a declaration of dependence on a friendship that can no longer answer him. The grief is not resolved by the conversation; it follows him into his later actions and perceptions.

After leaving the apartment, Lacke runs after Virginia. At the meeting point of what he has begun calling Jocke’s path and Virginia’s path, he sees a shadow fall from above onto her. The episode links Jocke’s absence to the danger still moving through the neighborhood, without making Jocke responsible for what happens to Virginia. Later, Lacke returns to the underpass and passes it on his way through the park. The place has become inseparable from the disappearance: even the route and surrounding trees prompt him to consider the danger that ordinary explanations cannot comfortably contain.

Discovery and the Unsettled Identity of the Killer

News coverage makes Jocke’s death public after his body is discovered in the ice. The papers emphasize the macabre discovery, including the children watching and the fire department having to saw into the ice. They describe Jocke as a murdered alcoholic, a description that reduces a distinctive friendship to a sensational story and a social category. A passport photograph accompanies the report. For Lacke, the public account does not eclipse Jocke as a friend; rather, it makes the fact of his murder impossible to keep separate from the search for its cause.

Lacke’s reading of the news produces a sharp reversal. He recognizes in a photograph a man who had bought him whisky at the Chinese restaurant, and realizes that this man lived only a few doors away in the same building complex. He remembers having greeted him. At first, the recognition connects the neighbor to Jocke’s murder. Then Lacke revises that conclusion: the man in the photograph was not the one who did it. The account stops as Lacke begins to form another connection, leaving the final identification unresolved in this moment. Jocke’s death thus remains both a confirmed loss and an incomplete explanation.

Narrative Significance

Jocke matters less as a participant in the novel’s present action than as the absence around which Lacke’s mourning and investigation take shape. The path bearing his name, the underpass, the imprint in the leaves, and the body locked in ice mark successive stages in how an unobserved disappearance becomes a death understood by the community. Each stage supplies evidence while leaving something inaccessible: Gosta’s account is incomplete, the body is initially missing, and the first apparent identification of the killer proves mistaken.

The contrast between the headlines and Lacke’s private grief is central to Jocke’s role. The newspaper has a dramatic discovery and a photograph; Lacke has the memory of a friend he believes could not be replaced. The public story makes Jocke noteworthy because of how his body was found, while Lacke’s response insists that the loss is not exhausted by the manner of death. Through that tension, Jocke’s limited presence becomes a measure of friendship, grief, and the difference between knowing that someone is dead and understanding what happened to him.