Fatherhood, sacrifice, and violence

Fatherhood, sacrifice, and violence are bound together by a question the novel refuses to treat as simple: what does a good father owe a child, and what can that duty be made to justify? Men in the story variously define fatherhood as providing, protecting, expressing love, or honoring an inherited obligation. The same language of devotion can acknowledge real care and conceal abandonment or harm. Against grand claims of sacrifice, the novel places the less dramatic work of remaining present to a child and saying plainly that the child is loved.

Provision and the Cost of Absence

William Wheeler describes a model of fatherhood built around relentless work and financial provision. Speaking to Apollo Kagwa, he recognizes that he belongs to a generation taught that working and providing were enough to make a man a good father. Looking back after roughly twenty or twenty-five years, he sees the cost: his wife and children might respect him, but they did not know him closely enough to share happiness with him. His account makes absence possible even inside a household. A father may be working for his family and still become a stranger to them.

William also places his regret in changing economic circumstances. He contrasts the earlier possibility of raising a family on one income with a present in which, as he sees it, couples in the middle must both work to stay afloat. He notices younger fathers pushing strollers on their way to work or spending early mornings with their children at the park, and realizes that he had not understood such ordinary care as something worth wanting. His own father had not made it a priority. The observation does not erase economic pressure, but it exposes the limits of treating provision as a substitute for intimacy.

The book William hopes will help him reconcile with Gretta Wheeler gives his regret a personal form. Gretta had read it to their daughters as her own father had read it to her; William had once used its central father as a pet name for his wife, but cannot remember when he stopped. He says he had never hit or cheated on her and that they barely argued, yet she left because they had become strangers. He has spent much of his savings trying to win her back, and now understands that the acts he considered proof of love did not communicate love by themselves. He says he should have told his daughters he loved them rather than assume they would infer it from what he did for them. His belated recognition sharpens the distinction between sacrifice as provision and care as a relationship that must be expressed and shared.

A Good Father as a Dangerous Justification

Jorgen Knudsen turns the question of paternal duty into a direct challenge to Apollo. He acknowledges guilt for what he and the men in his family have done, and the scar on his throat is evidence of a previous suicide attempt. Yet he asks Apollo what he would do for his child. Apollo answers that he would do anything. Jorgen immediately treats that answer as confirmation of his own standard: a good father must say and do the same. The exchange makes the danger visible. A willingness to sacrifice for a child sounds like devotion, but without limits it can also become a license to decide that almost any action is necessary.

Jorgen connects this logic to his family’s history and to economic grievance. He describes the remains of the Knudsen family line as himself, the house, and its debts. His son had a wife, two daughters, and a good job working with computers, but Jorgen says the job did not provide enough. He mourns a lost guarantee that white men’s children would do better than their fathers and resents what he calls the displacement of that guarantee by fairness and balance. This account exposes how his defense of fatherhood is entangled with a claim to inherited entitlement, rather than being limited to concern for a child’s welfare.

According to Jorgen, his son believed the troll was not a burden but a blessing, and that the family should restore an old pact. Jorgen says his son thought the family’s decline began when Nils Knudsen refused, about 190 years earlier, to sacrifice one of Petra Mikkelsdatter’s children. In his account, honoring the pact would restore the family’s origins and deliver it from its difficulties. His son therefore left Agnes in a forest cave, repeating what Jorgen presents as an ancestral precedent. Jorgen calls this courage and says his son loved his family so much that he would sacrifice his own child. But Gretta left and took Grace with her; Jorgen says that loss broke his son and that he has cared for him since. The contrast between Jorgen’s language of love and the child’s abandonment shows how an inherited story can turn violence into a supposed act of protection.

Repetition, Blame, and the Meaning of Protection

The novel returns to this conflict when Apollo and Emma Valentine confront Kinder Garten. Apollo tells him that his father tried to protect him. Kinder Garten counters that being raised by a man like that was worse than being abandoned. When Apollo insists that the father did what any good father would do, Kinder Garten accuses him of sounding like his father and offers a different definition: a good father protects his children by planning for their future. He blames the absence of such planning for the sacrifice he says he had to make. The exchange does not resolve the dispute; instead, each man uses the language of protection to assign responsibility elsewhere.

An iPad nearby continues scrolling through photographs of the same small child at different moments in the first six months of life. The images of infancy sit beside the men’s arguments about paternal duty, giving those arguments a concrete human stake without settling their competing claims. Kinder Garten’s account of sacrifice and Apollo’s appeal to a father’s protective intentions both risk making the child secondary to adult explanations. The scene’s repeated invocation of what a good father does is therefore less a stable moral rule than a point of conflict: the phrase can name care, but it can also help speakers excuse decisions whose consequences fall on children.

Jorgen’s account of fatherhood is also connected to his account of modern technology. He says that in the past he searched for children who had no protection, but that now a man hardly needs to leave home: an internet connection is enough. He compares a computer or phone to a home and argues that, unlike a physical building, technology has no door to lock. In this comparison, a father’s duty to protect is set against a world in which access and exposure cross domestic boundaries. The novel places that claim alongside the online presence of Kinder Garten, linking the vulnerability of children to the spaces adults create and use, rather than presenting protection as a matter of paternal intention alone.

Apollo’s Counterpoint: Care Over Time

Apollo’s own history makes these arguments personal. In the darkness of the underground amphitheater, he thinks of Brian West and remembers an act of violence against him as a child. He also considers his own periods of impatience and cruelty toward Emma, asking himself how a father can persuade himself that he remains good. The comparison does not make the different acts equivalent; it reveals Apollo’s fear that the desire to be a good father can coexist with conduct that hurts the people a father claims to love. The novel tests paternal identity through actions and consequences, not through a man’s self-description alone.

After Brian Kagwa is recovered, Apollo imagines the years of ordinary parenting ahead: toilet training, interrupted nights, coaxing him to eat vegetables and go to kindergarten, homework, cleaning him up after a fight, and confronting the first time he steals money. He also anticipates the later disappointments and arguments that will come as Brian grows up and judges his father. Apollo is grateful for all of it. This vision does not promise effortless happiness or a flawless father; it welcomes the continuing obligations, frustrations, and changes of an actual relationship. Set against the inherited pact and the men’s claims that sacrifice proves love, the anticipated years of care offer a different measure of fatherhood: not one spectacular act that settles the question, but sustained presence through an unpredictable life.