Akershus University Hospital is where Harry Hole’s concern for his father becomes an immediate ethical burden. In scenes on the hematology ward, the hospital’s rooms and corridors frame a progression from routine care to Harry’s painful recognition that his father has asked him to help end his life.

Setting and Care

When Harry reaches his father’s room, Sigurd Altman, a caregiver, is leaving. He explains that Harry’s father is asleep after receiving ten milligrams of morphine, though Harry may still go in; it will be several hours before he wakes. The detail places pain relief at the center of the hospital scenes: medication can ease suffering, but it also raises questions about what care means when a patient’s suffering cannot simply be removed.

Outside, Harry invites Altman to smoke. Altman says that he specialized in anesthesia because his mother had to endure more pain than necessary. His personal reason for entering the field gives the exchange a second perspective on medical care: the people administering relief carry their own histories of suffering into the work.

Harry and His Father

Later, Harry climbs the stairs to the hematology department in a state of intoxication, anger, and self-disgust. He is sweating and cold, his teeth chattering, and he has fifty meters left to reach the door behind which his father lies. A nurse and a bald man stop him in the corridor. The approach is physically difficult and interrupted, making the hospital a place Harry must struggle to enter even before he can face what brought him there.

In conversation with Altman, Harry asks whether he has ever been asked to assist with euthanasia. When Altman says that he has, Harry reveals that his father has asked him. The disclosure changes the meaning of Harry’s urgent visit: he has not come only to see an ill parent, but is carrying a decision that could place responsibility for his father’s death in his own hands.

Narrative Significance

The hospital connects intimate family history with a question that cannot be settled by treatment alone. Altman’s account of his mother’s pain offers a history of why he chose anesthesia; Harry’s father’s request makes the same subject personal and immediate. The contrast between morphine administered as care and the request for euthanasia sharpens the scene’s central tension without resolving it. Akershus University Hospital thus serves not merely as a medical backdrop but as the setting where Harry’s duty to his father and his fear of what that duty entails meet directly.