Zelfmoord als wraakmiddel

Zelfmoord als wraakmiddel is the retaliatory logic Peter gives to his intended suicide: he imagines making his death an accusation Eva will have to carry. The plan’s imagined audience and aftermath matter as much as death itself, but the violence eventually leaves him alive to face its consequences.

The Threat as Retaliation

Peter frames Eva’s departure not as a separation he can survive but as the end of his own life. He thinks that he has lived only for her and that, without her, he will slowly disappear; from this sense of absolute dependence, he turns suicide into a means of making her answer for leaving. He intends not merely to die, but to make her witness his death and understand it as something she has helped bring about.

He has kept the pistol, though he had considered throwing it into the Waal from the bridge at Zaltbommel. He missed the turnoff and postponed getting rid of it, telling himself there would be another chance; now he is hurrying to find Eva. In his imagined scene, he will enter, stand before her, and shoot himself, making his blood and death a permanent stain on her relationship with Steef. He anticipates that others will call his death his own choice, while insisting that Eva will know he has made her responsible. The fantasy makes revenge depend on her future memory and guilt, not on his survival.

The Reversal of the Plan

After the shooting, the retaliatory fantasy gives way to an immediate, bodily struggle to die. When the room finally falls silent, Peter collapses and points the gun at his heart, but pain keeps him from raising his hand. The guitars that had filled his thoughts fade; tears and burning sobs replace the imagined spectacle in which Eva would be forced to witness his death. His intended final act has become private and uncertain, with no triumph in it.

That uncertainty breaks when Peter sees the child crouched beneath the kitchen counter, clutching a stuffed rabbit and crying. The sight turns survival into a punishment he must accept: he understands that he will have to live with what he has done and face the child’s eyes. Rather than making Eva bear the whole meaning of his death, Peter resolves to remain alive for the child and to atone. He cannot reach out or retrieve his mobile without pain, but he whispers an apology. The child quiets, puts a pacifier in his mouth, and stares at Peter with frightened blue eyes. The scene reverses suicide as revenge: the person Peter had imagined making others witness his death is left alive, confronted instead with the vulnerable witness to his violence.

The Discovery Behind the Threat

Before the retaliatory fantasy becomes an imagined scene of accusation, Peter finds Eva at the cottage. Moving low beside the pond, he follows the light and sees her facing Steef, trembling and sinking to her knees as she crawls toward him. Peter reads her posture as humiliating submission and Steef’s closed expression as unyielding; the scene is filtered through Peter’s revulsion, not presented as a neutral account of what passes between them. His own heart seems to drop as the sight confirms that Eva is really there with Steef.

The setting sharpens the contrast that governs Peter’s response. Nearby, people celebrate liberation, while he approaches Eva’s lit cottage in secrecy, step by step, and hears only his heavy breathing before a duck’s sudden movement startles him. The public celebration offers an image of release that Peter cannot accept: he turns what he sees into a private crisis of abandonment and imagined retaliation. His suicide threat grows from this constricted interpretation, in which Eva’s life with someone else becomes proof that his own life has ended.

Narrative Meaning

Peter’s imagined suicide is also an attempt to dictate how others will remember the separation: he anticipates that outsiders will call his death his own choice, while Eva alone will be made to feel that she helped cause it. The gap between that carefully scripted accusation and his eventual inability to complete the final shot exposes the limits of the control he seeks. The child’s frightened gaze becomes the witness he cannot turn into an instrument of revenge; survival leaves Peter answerable not to the future guilt he planned for Eva, but to the living person before him.