Arvid Pettersson

Arvid Pettersson, called the Bull of Nybacken, is a twenty-five-year-old farm servant whose experience exposes the costs of a life governed by other people’s commands. His journey to America with Robert carries him out of the Swedish service system, but the crossing does not offer an uncomplicated freedom: Arvid relishes the rare ease of being a passenger even as the ship’s limits make him fear for his safety.

Identity and Life at Nybacken

At Nybacken, Arvid is accustomed to the farm’s severe routine. He knows that hired labor is demanding, and he treats its hardships as ordinary facts of working life. Robert, newly arrived and inexperienced, learns the place through Arvid’s explanations. The contrast between them makes Arvid an interpreter of the farm’s customs, even when he does not challenge those customs himself.

The work is distributed through a hierarchy in which the youngest hired man can be sent and corrected by everyone on the farm. Robert is awakened at four in the morning and hurried to work by Aron, while Arvid understands such demands as part of service. The animals, too, structure the men’s days: the horses need feeding, grooming, clean stalls, hay, oats, cut fodder, and water. Farmhands are bound to animals kept in their stalls, and a servant’s year leaves only one free week out of 358 days. Arvid’s familiarity with this system gives the novel a practical measure of its constraints: labor occupies not just the workday but nearly the whole calendar.

The Road to America

Arvid’s name appears among the emigrants as the servant of Karl Oskar and Kristina, aged twenty-five. At Åkerby Junction, the travelers’ arrangements bring him and Robert together again. The Korpamoen wagon is overloaded with four adults in addition to its other passengers, so Robert shifts to Jonas Petter’s wagon and takes a seat beside the driver and Elin. Arvid sits behind him. The two former farmhands from Nybacken are now traveling together to the New World, though not in the secretive, solitary fashion they had once imagined: they have not slipped away on a load of timber, and they are part of a larger emigrant company.

The reunion is a change in status as well as company. On land, Arvid and Robert had shared the stable room and the burdens of farm service; on the road, they are among a group moving toward a destination neither has yet reached. The journey makes their departure collective, and Arvid’s place in it depends on the kindness of Danjel and his wife. He is grateful that the couple enabled him to come, and his account of them emphasizes their generosity rather than any claim of his own to resources or authority.

A Passenger’s Unexpected Ease

Aboard the Charlotta, Arvid repeatedly turns over the word passenger. He has never before had food without earning it through work: now he receives three meals a day and can walk about the ship without a farmer ordering him to help. Sundays and weekdays feel alike because, for once, nobody summons him to feed horses or condemns him for resting. The relief is physical and immediate. He has never known a free week in practice, even when the formal week off brought him home to chores demanded by his parents; at sea, he can leave his labor undone and still be fed.

This new ease also reveals the distance between Arvid’s experience and Robert’s literacy. Robert tries to teach him to spell passenger, explaining a sound in the word, but Arvid cannot follow the lesson and pretends otherwise. His comic attempt to make sense of the sound through a familiar vulgar word shows both his embarrassment and the intimacy between the two men: Robert can teach, while Arvid answers from a different education, shaped by farm work and speech rather than books.

The ship’s provisions are controlled by rules rather than personal choice. The mate assigns each passenger a weekly portion of unprepared food and warns that the allotment must last; passengers must take turns using the galley, and refuse must be thrown overboard on the leeward side. This system is not Arvid’s farm service, but it places food and daily conduct under another authority. His pleasure at being fed without labor is therefore real, yet it occurs within a tightly managed voyage, not outside all forms of command.

Fear, Faith, and the Limits of Freedom

Arvid’s confidence in the passenger’s life coexists with unease about the sea. The ship rocks and appears to tilt; he imagines that it might overturn and sink. He cannot swim, and the danger brings him back to the prayerbook his mother gave him. Although he cannot read, he knows prayers by heart and recites them as best he can, accepting that he may mix up the words. Prayer steadies him in a world where he cannot control the vessel or save himself by swimming.

After a week aboard, Robert reaches a more skeptical conclusion about freedom at sea. He sees the seamen’s work aloft as dangerous and their watches as a routine that allows no full rest. Sailors live confined within the ship’s narrow dimensions, while farmhands remain tied to the horses and their tasks. Robert recalls that the stable room at Nybacken, despite its bedbugs, had been better quarters than the seamen’s crowded forecastle. Arvid’s joyful experience as a passenger is not disproved by this comparison, but it is set beside a harder account of maritime life: the voyage temporarily frees him from earning his keep, while the ship remains a bounded world with its own labor, rules, and dangers.

Narrative Role

Arvid’s shipboard voice makes freedom concrete in meals, rest, and the absence of a master’s call. His description of being allowed to eat without labor turns an abstract hope into an everyday reversal: for once, he can do nothing and still be provided for. The comedy of his misunderstanding of a spelling lesson does not erase the seriousness of his circumstances; it shows how unevenly education and authority are distributed between him and Robert.

Through Arvid, the passage distinguishes a passenger from both a servant and a sailor. He has escaped the farm’s relentless schedule and can experience the Atlantic crossing as a rare holiday from work. Yet his fear of drowning and Robert’s account of sailors’ confinement prevent that relief from becoming a simple promise of liberation. Arvid’s experience remains specific: not freedom from every constraint, but a startling interval in which no farmer orders him to work and three meals arrive anyway.