Asarum

Asarum matters to the novel as a measure of how far a person’s story can travel beyond his actual experience. During the crossing, Robert learns that Fredrik Mattsson, known among the passengers as the American, had never before left his home parish; the revelation turns Asarum from a place-name into the boundary of Fredrik’s real travels and the starting point of his invented ones.

Identity and Setting

Asarum is named as the parish where Fredrik Mattsson and the Charlotta’s sailmaker were born. The sailmaker had known Fredrik since infancy, so his account carries the authority of long familiarity with the man and his local reputation. The parish is in Blekinge, which places Fredrik’s background within the Swedish communities from which the emigrants are departing.

Fredrik Mattsson’s Departure

The sailmaker tells Robert that Fredrik’s circumstances at home were troubled: three women were pregnant by him at the same time, he owed money widely, and he had reason to expect retaliation. According to this account, he was slipping away to America aboard the Charlotta to escape the consequences. Though he had presented himself as a seaman, he had never actually gone to sea before boarding the ship, and had never been outside Asarum.

The American and the Story

Robert discovers that the passengers called Fredrik the American not because he had been to America, but because he had never been there. The nickname converts ignorance into apparent expertise: Fredrik’s supposed knowledge of the United States rests on a title that means the opposite of what Robert first assumes. Robert is disappointed in the man whose confident manner had made him seem a source of reliable information about the destination.

The discovery also unsettles Robert’s own standards of truth. He recognizes that when telling stories about what he has read or experienced, he sometimes invents material to continue when he cannot go on, later blending invention and fact until he cannot separate them. Asarum therefore anchors a broader contrast between actual experience and narrated experience: Fredrik’s local origins expose the false authority of his American persona, while Robert’s self-recognition shows how easily a lie can become woven into a story believed as truth.