Guilt and Self-Blame

Guilt and self-blame in the novel are less settled judgments than burdens the characters keep carrying: Kaja Solness believes Even’s death is her fault, while Harry Hole seeks forgiveness for refusing his father’s request for help dying. Their parallel confessions reveal how responsibility can persist as an inward accusation even when another person offers a more merciful interpretation. The theme also shadows Harry’s attempts to manage addiction, linking the need to escape pain with the shame of needing an escape.

Guilt as a Private Verdict

Kaja’s account gives self-blame its starkest form. After leaving the hospital, she could not bring herself to open the door to her room. She was certain that Even would be hanging there again if she did, and that the sight would confirm her own responsibility. The door becomes more than an entrance: it is the threshold of a memory she cannot bear to face, and her inability to cross it shows how guilt can restrict ordinary movement as effectively as a locked room.

The scene does not establish that Kaja’s feeling of responsibility is an objective account of what caused Even’s death. It establishes that she experiences it as certainty. Her repeated insistence that the blame is hers leaves little room for consolation, even from herself. The difference between what she feels and what can be known matters: self-blame becomes an explanation she cannot set aside, rather than a conclusion tested against other possibilities.

Harry’s Recognition and Silence

Harry meets Kaja’s confession with a bleak sense of recognition. He, too, describes guilt as something people claim for themselves and struggle to disprove. The exchange is not a resolution: shared recognition briefly allows the two to speak together, but it does not release Kaja from her conviction. In the darkness of the firing slits, with a ship having docked below them and wind moving through the openings, the conversation makes their isolation palpable without turning it into a simple cure. Harry discards one cigarette and lights another as the talk continues, a small repeated gesture beside an accusation neither can easily put down.

Kaja asks whether Harry already knew. He says he did not know all along; his understanding dates from seeing Björn Holm’s face in the doorway at Holmenveien. Harry recalls Holm as an excellent forensic technician but a poor actor, and interprets his genuine surprise as a significant clue. This detail gives Harry’s knowledge a specific beginning and makes the confession part of a larger pattern of discovery: emotional certainty and investigative inference are not the same thing, though both bear on how the characters understand responsibility.

The Burden of Refusal

Harry’s guilt concerning his father, Olav Hole, takes a different shape. He visits Sigurd Altman, an anesthesia nurse who has been asked to help patients die, and tells him that his own father has made such a request. Harry says he came to ask forgiveness because he cannot fulfill it. The request is not presented as a question of whether Harry loves his father; its force lies in the conflict between his father’s wish and the burden of being asked to act on it.

Altman tells Harry that no one can demand that another person help them leave life, least of all a son. His response offers Harry a way to understand refusal without treating it as a moral failure. But Harry’s need to ask for forgiveness shows that reassurance does not automatically dissolve guilt. He is seeking absolution for a limit he cannot cross, not disputing that his father is suffering.

Harry then recalls a different encounter: when he captured a dying, dangerous enemy, the man had arranged matters so that Harry might shoot him. The man had killed many people and inflicted lasting injuries on Harry and those he loved; he was also suffering from incurable scleroderma. Harry had the revolver trained on him and, as he recounts it, could have shot without risk. He refused. The contrast with his father’s request makes Harry’s position more complicated, not simpler: he has already faced a moment when death could be delivered, yet refusal remains part of what he must explain to himself. The account does not equate the two men or the circumstances; it shows how the memory of a consequential choice can return when Harry confronts another request for help dying.

Addiction, Shame, and Self-Management

Harry’s self-reproach also appears in his efforts to keep alcohol at bay. When asked why he uses drugs, he explains that he does so to avoid drinking and identifies himself as an alcoholic. In his apartment, the danger becomes a struggle with what he imagines as dogs pulling at his insides. He recalls that Rakel, Oleg, work, and perhaps even his father once gave him reasons to stop drinking; now, he feels that those reasons have disappeared. He tells himself that drinking must not happen and turns to opium as an alternative he can control.

The act is accompanied by shame. Harry recognizes Kaja’s role in making the opium available and feels ashamed even as he proceeds. He measures out a small piece, warms it on a spoon, collects the smoke under a glass, and inhales through a straw. He monitors his use and recalls periods in Hong Kong when he went without opium for a week or two, but he also acknowledges that the boundary between control and dependence is fluid. His careful procedure is therefore double-edged: it gives him a sense of discipline while making visible how urgently he needs relief.

Later, after sitting for an hour beside his father and watching him breathe, Harry returns home, listens to an old Duke Ellington record belonging to his father, and takes out the brown lump of opium. He leaves a message from Gunnar Hagen unheard, believing it concerns Mikael Bellman’s pressure on the investigation and the demand that Harry return to ordinary police duty. The sequence places private grief, professional pressure, and drug use in close succession, without claiming that one alone explains the others. Across these scenes, guilt is not a single confession with a final absolution: it is a recurring weight that shapes what Harry and Kaja can face, refuse, and endure.