Someone must take the responsibility, I take the responsibility

The declaration that someone must take responsibility, and that Karl Oskar will do so, is the moral hinge of his family’s emigration. It turns a difficult choice into a personal commitment: Karl Oskar accepts the authority to persuade his household to leave, then confronts the cost of that choice when Kristina’s life is in danger during the crossing.

The choice to leave

The phrase grows out of circumstances that make staying at Korpamoen seem like a slow exhaustion. After four years, Karl Oskar and Kristina are several hundred riksdaler poorer; the work has consumed their youth without improving their position. He imagines them eventually worn out and confined to the meager security of his parents’ reserved room. Emigration offers a way out of that future, but it is not a choice made with certainty.

Kristina sees the other side of the decision. No one has promised them land in North America, Karl Oskar has no deed awaiting him, and neither of them knows a farmer with a wife and children who has made the journey. To her, the claims about America rest on unreliable reports and printed accounts. The phrase’s assertion of responsibility therefore answers not only hardship but also uncertainty and disagreement within the marriage.

A commitment made practical

Karl Oskar’s resolve is accompanied by arrangements that make departure possible. He and Robert secure passage on the Charlotta, a merchant vessel sailing from Karlshamn directly to New York; Karl Oskar sends a hundred daler as a down payment for six people. When Danjel considers joining the emigrants, Karl Oskar helps him find a way aboard, and Robert is to seek a passage contract for Danjel’s household if the ship has room. A personal decision begins to draw other households into a shared journey.

The practical limits are stark. After selling Korpamoen and its belongings, and deducting the mortgage and other debts, Karl Oskar has 1,200 daler. The family’s passage costs 675 daler, leaving about 500 for arrival fees, onward travel, and the tools and cattle needed to begin again. He asks Kristina to sew that remaining money into a sheepskin bag that he can fasten next to his body. Responsibility here is neither abstract nor cost-free: it means risking the family’s remaining security on an uncertain future.

From household decision to collective movement

The emigrants’ departure joins distinct private pressures into a group journey. The broader movement gathers people pushed by crop failure, religious persecution and dissent, personal troubles, social ostracism, and unfair employment practices. At Åkerby Junction, sixteen emigrants—nine adults and seven children—meet in wagons bound for Karlshamn. The group must decide who will lead it; when the others look to Karl Oskar, he initially points out that he is the youngest of the three farmers, and Jonas Petter is named as the eldest.

That hesitation sharpens the meaning of Karl Oskar’s declaration. He is not simply claiming rank over the travelers. His decision has already set the family in motion, and his assistance helps make room for Danjel’s party as well. The phrase frames leadership less as command than as willingness to be answerable for a choice whose consequences reach beyond the person who made it.

The phrase returns at sea

During the voyage, Kristina suffers a severe illness. Karl Oskar takes her cold hand on the quilt, and the responsibility he had tried to avoid feeling comes upon him with force: he had persuaded her to follow him and brought his wife and children across the sea. The declaration he had made as a resolve now sounds, to him, like a debt falling due. He regrets what he has done and fears the price of having insisted on emigration.

His inward reckoning intensifies as he imagines Kristina dying and himself arriving alone with their children. He remembers that she opposed the move from the beginning, that he persuaded her, and that she had nevertheless told him she had nothing to forgive. The contrast makes the phrase painful: Kristina’s forgiveness does not erase his sense that the decision, and its possible cost to her, are his to bear.

Agency and its cost

The declaration does not prove that Karl Oskar could control the dangers of migration. The crossing brings storms, illness, confinement, and physical suffering; by the time America appears, scurvy and ship’s fever have weakened the passengers, and the voyage has worn down their spirits. The new sight of green earth revives them, but that relief does not undo the uncertainty or the losses they have endured.

Instead, the phrase gives the journey an ethical center. Karl Oskar’s willingness to act enables escape from a life of debt and diminishing prospects, yet it also binds him to the people he persuades to come. Its recurrence during Kristina’s illness changes the emphasis from resolve to remorse: to take responsibility is not to guarantee a safe outcome, but to refuse to disown the choice when its human consequences become unbearable.