Drowning and diving

Drowning and diving form a recurring pattern through which the novel considers hope, loss, and the limits of rescue. The image first comes to Martha in a letter from Sonny, who recounts his father’s attempt to save a drowning man; it returns at the church, where Simon dives into danger to protect Sonny and then accepts that he will not come back. The movement between these scenes turns diving from a possible rescue into a final passage.

The story of the failed rescue

In the letter, Sonny tells Martha a story his father had shared about a night patrol near the harbour at Kongen. A boy’s father had fallen into the sea while the two were mooring their boat. The boy could not pull him back aboard, and the man disappeared beneath the water before the patrol car arrived. As the boy waited with the police, his father briefly surfaced. The boy rejoiced, believing the danger had passed, but the man went under again. Sonny’s father entered the water in an attempt to rescue him and could not find him in the darkness.

The story’s defining turn is the brief return of the drowning man. His reappearance gives the boy a moment of certainty before the loss becomes final. Sonny says his father understood the episode as a terrible reversal: the boy’s happiness at seeing his father alive made the subsequent realization more devastating. The possibility of rescue is not simply absent; it appears to be granted and then withdrawn.

Sonny connects the story to his own discovery of his father’s diary. He cannot decide whether his father hid it so that his family would find it or whether the hiding place was an expression of cruelty. That uncertainty echoes the story’s unstable promise of return. In the letter, Sonny tells Martha that she has a life ahead of her and can do good, while he cannot do the same; he says he will disappear and asks her to forgive him. The tale of a failed rescue thus accompanies his own announced departure, without promising that another person can bring him back.

The drowning image in the final confrontation

At the church, the image shifts from a rescue witnessed and remembered to an immediate decision. Simon sees a hand raised in the gap in a curtain, holding a gold-plated pistol lighter, and understands that there is too little time to warn Sonny, draw his own weapon, or reach Else. The narration places him on the railings of the bridge over the Aker River, with the river raging below, before he dives.

Simon’s leap carries the language of gambling as well as drowning. He enters the danger as a man prepared to wager a future he does not value highly, and the passage frames the action as a desperate choice rather than a calculated plan. He dives into the space between Sonny and the perforated wooden board. The act does not stop the violence: he hears a gunshot and is left incapacitated, while the Uzi sounds afterward. The contrast with the earlier story is stark. Sonny’s father entered dark water in an attempt to save a stranger; Simon dives into a confined space to protect Sonny, knowing there is no time for a safer intervention.

The Twin and the reflected double

The final scene also folds the motif of diving into the history of the Twin. Simon recalls what the Twin’s mother, Sissel, had told him about her young son looking into a bucket of water and seeing someone who looked like him. When Sissel returned, the child was stuck headfirst in the bucket. After she pulled him free, he laughed and said that the Twin had been bad and tried to kill him. The childhood incident gives the name an uncanny origin: a reflection becomes an imagined other, and a dangerous encounter with water becomes part of the story of the man who will later be called the Twin.

As the Twin is shot, Simon recognizes the apparent impossibility of the man’s survival and recalls Sissel’s account of his childhood. His thought that the Twin was a perfectly normal only child binds the supposed double back to an ordinary family history, even as the name and the remembered episode retain their disturbing force. Here water does not offer a route back to life. It supplies the setting for a child’s encounter with his reflected image, which the novel later brings into the church at the moment of the Twin’s death.

Simon’s final acceptance

After the confrontation, a boy gives Simon the photograph of the three friends. He tells Simon that he was the Diver, always with them but absent from the picture, and slips the photograph into Simon’s jacket. The object offers Simon a place in the friendship he had not been visibly included in. The boy’s words about mercy and forgiveness frame the gesture as recognition, not as a reversal of what has happened.

A drop of blood falls from the boy’s jacket onto the church floor. Simon touches it and closes his eyes. The narration returns to water through his vision of a foaming waterfall and an icy embrace, followed by silence, solitude, and peace. It ends by making the distinction that governs the motif: this time Simon will not resurface. Earlier, a brief resurfacing had given a boy false hope; Simon’s final image instead closes the possibility of return. His dive saves no one from the consequences of the church confrontation, but it is an intentional intervention for Sonny, followed by an acceptance of his own ending.

Pattern and significance

Across the letter, the Twin’s childhood memory, and the church scene, water carries sharply different meanings. It is the setting for a rescue that fails, the medium of a child’s unsettling encounter with his reflection, and the image through which Simon understands his last moments. These episodes do not make every dive equivalent: Sonny’s father acts in darkness without finding the man, while Simon chooses to intervene between an armed threat and Sonny. What links them is the precarious boundary between return and final disappearance.

The motif also changes the meaning of rescue. In Sonny’s letter, the hope of rescue is cruelly brief, and Sonny’s own promise to disappear follows the story. In the church, Simon’s dive is not presented as a guarantee that everything can be made right. The photograph, the boy’s words, and Simon’s final vision instead give the ending a form of recognition and peace that does not undo death. Drowning and diving therefore bind the novel’s scenes of loss to its questions about whether another person can be saved, and what it means to choose the risk even when rescue is uncertain.