Father and I: Par Lagerkvist Adds Layers of Meaning to a Simple Sunday Stroll

"Father and I" is a story I've run across in at least a couple anthologies over the years. It's always a rewarding read, so I will share this as a companion piece to Par Lagerkvist's Barabbas, which I wrote about yesterday.

"Father and I" may be one of Lagerkvist's finest short works. It's masterfully simple. On the surface, almost nothing happens. A nine- or ten-year-old boy spends a Sunday afternoon walking through the countryside with his father, a railway worker. They listen to birds, smell the spring air, throw stones into a stream, and walk along the railroad tracks where the father greets passing engineers by name. The world is harmonious, ordered, and familiar.

When darkness falls. everything changes. As they head home the same woods become threatening. The stream that had murmured pleasantly now roars like an abyss. The telegraph poles no longer "sing" but seem to rumble ominously from deep within the earth. The boy's excitement over a glowworm goes unnoticed by his father, creating the first hint of emotional separation.

At the story's culmination  an unexpected black train rushes past in the darkness. The father, who has recognized every train and every engineer throughout the day, stops and says in surprise: "Strange, what train was that? And I didn't recognize the driver." Then they walked on in silence, though the boy's body was shaking and his mind now supercharged with anxious thoughts about the future.

The story elements are freighted with meaning. The father represents certainty, tradition, continuity, and a world in which everything has a place. He knows every track, every timetable, every engineer. He possesses an unquestioned faith that gives coherence to reality. But suddenly there is a train that belongs to another order entirely—a train hurtling through darkness toward a destination the father cannot imagine.

The boy realizes that this unknown train is, in a sense, his own future. He will one day be leaving the secure world of childhood and entering a modern existence filled with uncertainty, alienation, and questions his father cannot answer.

What strikes me most is how this story anticipates Barabbas. In both works Lagerkvist writes about human beings suspended between worlds. The father inhabits a world of inherited faith; the son enters a world of existential doubt. Sahak possesses certainty; Barabbas longs for it but cannot attain it. Both protagonists are haunted by something absent—a security, a faith, a meaning that seems just beyond reach.

Lagerkvist's gift is that he never argues these ideas philosophically. He lets a walk through the woods, the sound of telegraph poles, or a black train disappearing into the night carry the entire weight of the human condition. The boy's fear isn't simply fear of the dark. One day he will board his own train for destinations unknown.

* * *

Reading the story always brings to mind a number of my own personal experiences with trains. It also brings to mind a story by Mike Savage about a father and son,  and a train, The Lost Locomotive of the Battle-Axe.  A youth joins his father for his first deer hunt in the brutal sub-zero snow of the northern woods. Bundled in wool and facing biting cold, the boy trudges through deep powder as they track big bucks. Amid the stark beauty and hardship, he helps field-dress a kill, confronting blood, guts, and the raw realities of manhood. The “lost locomotive” metaphor captures the father’s powerful, steam-like presence and the boy’s emerging sense of maturity. It’s a concise, visceral coming-of-age tale about initiation, father-son bonding, and the chill of growing up.

I also think there is an autobiographical element that makes the story especially poignant. It feels like Lagerkvist looking back across decades to the precise moment he sensed that he was departing from the unquestioned Christianity of his childhood into the uncertainty that would characterize both his life and his writing. The father is loved and admired, but he cannot accompany the son on the journey ahead.

Both stories revolve around fathers, sons, trains and mysteries. 

Read Par Lagerkvist's story here: Father and I

Haunted by Grace: Reflections on Pär Lagerkvist's Barabbas

From quite early in my life I've been drawn to European authors, though at that time I didn't know why. Later I realized that living through the World Wars and other horrors of the past centuries has produced a depth of consciousness which to some extent many Americans have only skimmed the surface. Over there, millions died and millions more lived in want while dreading potential outcomes, displacement and personal upheavals. 

One of the books I read in a fiction class in college was called Continental Short Stories. If you're a fledgling short story writer, I highly recommend acquiring short story anthologies as a way of getting introduced to new writers. (The same goes for readers, naturally.) In this volume you'll find Sarte, Kafka, Borges, Camus, Aichinger, Boll and many others including my first encounter with Pär Lagerkvist in a story called "Saviour John." 

Barabbas was published in 1950. The following year Lagerkvist received his Nobel Prize in Literature. The book explores faith, doubt, guilt, and the search for meaning through the eyes of the man who was released instead of Jesus.

What strikes me about Lagerkvist's writing was the clarity of his prose--spare, direct, and unadorned, yet filled with gravitas. He's not focused on literary acrobatics. Rather, his aim is the quiet exploration of extraordinary themes.

The novel begins with the familiar biblical scene. Barabbas, a murderer and insurrectionist, watches as the crowd chooses his freedom and Christ's crucifixion. Although he is physically liberated, he becomes psychologically imprisoned by the event. Why was he spared? Who was this man who died in his place? And why do others believe He rose from the dead?

What a starting point. Everything flows out from this momentous event.

Unable either to believe or to forget, Barabbas drifts through life as an outsider. He witnesses the early Christian movement but remains skeptical. He meets followers of Christ whose certainty only deepens his own uncertainty. He longs to believe but finds himself incapable of faith.

Throughout the novel, Lagerkvist presents Barabbas as a man haunted by absence. He is neither a committed pagan nor a Christian, but someone suspended between belief and unbelief. His encounters with suffering, love, violence, and death never resolve his inner conflict. Instead, they intensify it.

Eventually Barabbas is taken to Rome as a slave, where he works in the mines alongside Christian prisoners. There he develops a deep friendship with Sahak, a simple but unwavering believer. Their contrasting responses to suffering become the emotional center of the novel. Sahak possesses a certainty Barabbas envies but cannot attain.

After Sahak's execution, Barabbas continues wandering through a world that seems both empty and mysteriously charged with divine possibility. During Nero's persecution of Christians, he is arrested and crucified alongside them—not because he fully understands or embraces their faith, but because he has come to identify himself with the One who died in his place.

The story ends ambiguously. Rather than presenting faith as easy certainty, Lagerkvist explores the possibility that some people spend their entire lives circling belief, haunted by grace yet unable to grasp it fully. The novel asks whether doubt itself may be a form of seeking—and whether redemption can reach even those who never find complete certainty.

The novel is also about identity, for as John Donne wrote:

No man is a island
Entire of itself

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main. 

In this sense, the story of Barabbas intersects with our story as well. Barabbas is not merely a man from the first century. He is every person who has wanted to believe but struggled to do so, every seeker caught between skepticism and hope, every wanderer haunted by the possibility that grace might be real.

The genius of Lagerkvist's novel is that it transforms an obscure biblical figure into Everyman—a soul searching for meaning in a world where faith and uncertainty walk side by side, where doubt is not always the enemy of belief but sometimes the road that leads us toward it.