PETER CASSIRER
StartsidaSummary of my analysis of Hjalmar Söderbergs short story Pälsen (The Fur Coat)
Hjalmar Söderberg's Pälsen from 1997 (Translated by C. W. Storck as The fur coat in Söderberg, Selected short stories, New York 1935) is perhaps the best known Swedish short-story. Its literary merits lie foremost in the author's technique to let the reader understand more than does the protagonist, in spite of that it is through his reflections that the reader gets to know the facts of the story. One might even claim that in Pälsen the style is the message, since the story is in itself little original: the poor and sick doctor Henck is run over by a sleigh on his way to his well-to-do old friend Richardt in order to borrow some money. Besides this money he is also lends Richardt's fur-coat, in which he is not recognized either by his friends on his way home or his wife, who mistakes him for Richardt and kisses him affectionately. The story ends with a dialogue between Henck and Richardt in which Henck firmly declares that he has only a short time left and expresses his gratitude towards Richardt for having shown him and his wife so much kindness.
A main stylistic trait in Pälsen is contrast, the effect of which is not only amplification of the text in spite of its down-toned intensity but which also serves as a kind of gear-wheels to develope the story. For the interpretation I demonstrate three kinds of formal analysis: Greimas's actant-model, a kind of sociogram and a schema of motifs. It is stressed that formal analyses depend on interpretations and their foremost task is to illuminate this interpretation, not the least for the interpretor himself.
Söderberg also wrote a script for a silent movie with the short-story as a model. This script was never made into a film for obvious reasons, since it lacks all the literary merits of the original and rather bluntly reveals the weakness of the plot, thereby underlining the power of the style in which the short-story is written. My study tries to show how the reader's sympathy with Henck is established through a very empathic narrator and the fact that story is told to a very high extent through Henck's own reflections. Henck, who seems to be a looser from the very beginning, shows a remarkabel inner strength and composition when he is faced with the unfaithfulnes of his wife and the betrayal of his best friend, and thus in the end stands out as the moral victor. My hypothesis is that the popularity of Pälsen to a high degree is due to this fact.