Paternal influence and inheritance

Paternal influence and inheritance in the novel are not a simple matter of sons becoming like their fathers. The fathers leave behind standards, memories, and absences that shape what their sons believe they must become. For Sonny Lofthus, the death of his father coincides with a collapse into isolation and self-destruction; for Simon Kefas, the memory of an authoritarian father is bound up with a reckless ski jump, a damaged heirloom, and a punishment whose hidden tenderness he learns only afterward. Together, these histories make inheritance a pressure that can wound, but also a story that may be understood differently with time.

Sonny and the rupture of paternal loss

Kari Adel reports what she learned from one of Sonny’s former teachers: Sonny had wanted to become a police officer like his father, but after his father died, he went off course. He got into trouble at school, pushed people away, deliberately isolated himself, and became self-destructive. The sequence makes his father’s death more than a biographical fact. It marks a break between an aspiration modeled on paternal example and the withdrawal that follows when that example is no longer available.

The loss is registered in the family home through absence as well as memory. Looking at photographs there, Simon notices not only Sonny’s mother’s portrait but the faded rectangle on the wallpaper where another photograph used to hang. Kari is still describing the family’s disintegration after the suicide when Simon identifies the mother as Helene. The missing image gives material form to the gap left in the household, while the former teacher’s account connects that bereavement to Sonny’s increasingly deliberate separation from other people.

Yet Sonny’s father remains present in the life Sonny builds after the loss. At the centre, Johnny Puma sees a photograph pinned to Sonny’s wall: a man in police uniform. Johnny also notices expensive earrings on the windowsill and considers stealing them to meet his urgent need for money, but abandons the idea because the risk of a beating is too great. The scene places the father’s image beside an object that tempts another resident toward theft, while showing that Sonny keeps the photograph as a visible personal possession. Later, when asked who the man is, Sonny answers that he is his father; when asked whether he was a police officer, he confirms it. The brief exchange makes the uniform and Sonny’s childhood ambition converge: the father is both a remembered parent and the model for a future Sonny once imagined.

Simon’s father as authority and example

Simon’s account of his own father begins with an adult observation from Martha Lian: in the photographs, his father looks very authoritarian. Simon agrees that he was. The question of whether that authority was exercised well opens onto a memory in which paternal command and a son’s defiance are both unmistakable. At fifteen, Simon was determined to make a ski-jumping record at his grandfather’s home in Lesjaskog. His father had held the hill’s record, as Simon’s grandfather had before him, and Simon had trained all winter for the attempt.

The conditions made the jump hazardous. It was a late Easter, the snow had nearly disappeared from the sunny foot of the hill, and twigs and rocks protruded through it. Simon’s father told him not to jump. Simon nodded, but then recruited a boy from a neighbouring farm to witness and measure the attempt, and the two spread extra snow where Simon planned to land. For the jump he used skis his father had inherited from his own father. The succession of records and inherited equipment makes the stunt an unmistakable encounter with family precedent; Simon does not merely inherit the hill’s history but tries to surpass it on terms his father has expressly forbidden.

The jump initially feels like triumph. Simon starts too well, flies farther than he intended, and lands roughly four metres beyond the patch of snow they had spread. The skis cut through the slush, and a sharp stone sliced open his right ski. Bruised and soaked, he had broken nothing, but his first thought was what his father would say and that he had ruined the ski. The excitement of exceeding a paternal record turns at once into fear of having disobeyed the man whose judgment matters to him.

Punishment, affection, and the inherited object

Simon’s father does not announce a punishment himself. He asks his son what punishment would be suitable. Simon proposes three days of being grounded; because it is Easter, his father says two days will have to do. The exchange is at once disciplinary and restrained: the father holds Simon accountable for ignoring a direct warning, while the son participates in deciding the consequence.

Only after his father’s death does Simon learn what happened during those two days. His mother tells him that his father repeatedly asked the farm boy to show him where Simon had landed and to retell the story. Each time, his father laughed until he cried. He made Simon’s mother promise not to reveal this, because he thought doing so would only encourage further recklessness. Instead, he took the damaged ski home on the pretext that he wanted to repair it. Simon’s mother said the repair story was nonsense and that the ski was his father’s most precious keepsake. The concealed laughter and the preserved, split ski complicate the remembered authoritarianism: the father’s outward response was punishment, but his private delight and choice to keep the damaged object preserve the son’s audacity as a source of affection.

When Martha asks about the broken ski, Simon recounts the episode and then takes her to the basement to show it to her. It is a heavy white Splitkein ski with six grooves underneath. Its survival carries more than the record of an accident: it links the grandfather’s earlier record, the father’s inherited equipment, Simon’s forbidden jump, and the father’s decision to keep what his son damaged. Martha’s presence gives Simon occasion to tell the story aloud; a family memory that had remained partly hidden becomes a shared account between them.

Sons, likeness, and the prospect of change

Martha reads Simon’s story as part of a larger pattern between fathers and sons. She suggests that sons measure themselves against their fathers, just as daughters measure themselves against their mothers. She then proposes that sons expect eventually to become like their fathers and are disillusioned when they discover the older man’s weaknesses, because they recognize in those failings a possible image of their own future. In her account, the shock can be severe enough to make a son give up before he has begun.

The novel sets that interpretation beside two sharply different consequences of paternal influence. Sonny’s wish to follow his father into police work is followed, after his father’s death, by trouble, isolation, and self-destruction. Simon, by contrast, can narrate a youthful act of disobedience and remember a father whose authority coexisted with unspoken pride. His story does not reduce inheritance to escape or imitation: the damaged ski is at once evidence of defiance and a keepsake cherished by the man defied. Through these contrasts, paternal legacy becomes a struggle over what a father’s example means—and whether a son must repeat it, reject it, or find a different account of himself.