Fugitive Crosses His Tracks: The Thesis

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The workers of Jante are in a kind of 'perfect prison' where they self-monitor themselves, and one another's behavior for deviation. Deviance, social unrest, resistance to authority -- even challenging the factory owner who oppresses them -- is seen as getting too big for one's britches and a violation of Jante Law. A true Marxist would hope that a worker would be outraged at the behavior of the factory owner, and his actions towards Espen's family. However, a Jante resident is more apt to be angry at Espen's mother for wanting to improve her home, or daring to ask for a gift from the factory owner that others were not receiving. Despite the catastrophically low wages of all of the residents, the workers ineffectually blame one another, and make a virtue out of their own unnecessary suffering.

This focus upon the purely personal at the expense of real social change can also be seen in Espen: Espen's own revolt is ineffectual. He kills a friend, rather than turns against truly oppressive social structures.

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He turns his anger and guilt against himself, rather than against society, and he violates a true moral law -- not to kill -- rather than the false, socially constructed law of Jante. His apparent irrationality is a product of a fundamentally irrational society that is quietly and coldly mad. Rather than merely look at his own past, Espen needs to turn his attention outward -- from his own life, and from Jante, and draw connections between his personal history, the law of Jante, and the suffering of the larger world. Espen wonders how he could have grown up to be a murderer: the reader wonders how it is possible to murder Jante Law so individuals like Espen can live a more fulfilling life. Although the coolness of the novel's prose and social circumstances might seem uniquely Norwegian, it is easy to draw parallels between the live of the inhabitants of Jante and small, interconnected close-knit communities everywhere.

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