50 pages • 1 hour read
Fredrik BackmanAnxious People
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Connection Between Anxiety and “Idiocy”
The title of the novel refers to the dominant theme, which is the anxiety that every character feels. Each character initially feels alone in their anxiety, and this feeling of isolation leads them to do extraordinary things based on bad ideas. The narrator continually refers to the main characters as “idiots,” but the narrator uses this term endearingly to describe people who don’t have plans but instead are doing “[their] best to get through the day” (2). This suggests that when anxious people feel desperate, like they can’t make it through another day, this is when bad things happen. Nevertheless, these bad things can serendipitously transform into good things when people connect.
The narrator describes the bank robber as an “idiot” who felt trapped and followed a bad idea in her desperation. The novel builds sympathy for the bank robber’s situation by explaining the depths of her desperation, which stems from love and fear. She so deeply loved her daughters that she couldn’t bear losing them. This led her to believe that she could somehow rob a bank, pay her rent, and then one day pay the bank back. The narrator also softens the robber’s actions by drawing an implicit parallel between the bank robber and her hostages. The narrator calls both “idiots”—the latter because they don’t take the bank robber’s gun seriously and talk back to her rather than obey her. Under normal circumstances, this would be a foolish move because it could result in the hostages being shot. However, in this situation, the idiocy has positive results, the anxiety-induced “idiocy” of the participants in the exchange canceling itself out.
This corresponds to the shift in the definition of “idiot” that takes place throughout the novel. The narrator begins and ends the novel by saying that the book is “most of all about idiots” (336), but in the opening, the narrator uses “idiot” to describe characters driven by desperation, like the bank robber. By the end, the narrator uses the term to describe people who take great leaps of faith to overcome their anxieties. The term “idiot” shifts from people who make poor choices due to their anxiety to people who believe they can change. Through this transformation in meaning, the narrator demonstrates that the same “idiotic” force that compels people to make bad choices can be the same force that changes people for the good.
“Stockholm Syndrome,” Captivity, and Empathy
Stockholm syndrome is a term used to describe an alleged psychological phenomenon wherein a victim or hostage relates to and bonds with their captor or abuser. The term is controversial for a variety of reasons and does not describe a recognized mental illness. However, the concept is relevant to Anxious People, which plays with the concept to communicate its broader position on the origins of empathy.
Anxious People only briefly references Stockholm syndrome directly, but conversations about what it means to be “from Stockholm” subtly allude to it, ensuring the term is present in readers’ minds. Moreover, the novel centers on a situation that closely parallels the proposed disorder. The hostages inside the apartment quickly become sympathetic toward the bank robber when they realize that her motivations for wanting to rob the bank were pure and revolved around her desire to keep her daughters; they recognize that their anxieties stem from a similar interconnected love and fear they have for their loved ones. They empathize with her to such an extent that they conspire to shield her from the police.
In other respects, however, the novel’s portrayal sharply diverges from the conventional wisdom surrounding Stockholm syndrome. Most notably, the novel portrays this “syndrome” not as a disorder but as a virtue—or even the origin of empathy itself. Stockholm syndrome is related to captivity, and while the hostage situation involves literal, physical captivity, each character also feels inner captivity. The bank robber first feels held captive by her divorce and her inability to provide for herself, but she also feels held captive after accidentally taking the others hostage in the apartment because she realizes that she has no way out of her situation. Zara and Anna-Lena feel held captive by their guilt, while Estelle feels imprisoned by her loss. When each character recognizes that the other characters share the same anxieties stemming from their sense of inner captivity, this transforms the hostage situation into the catalyst for friendship. Captivity, which the novel suggests is a facet of the human condition, is therefore what allows the hostages to quickly sympathize with the bank robber. They see that she’s not a greedy, dangerous bank robber but is instead an anxious person like the rest of them.
Challenging Preconceptions
The narrator is opinionated and omniscient, and strategically hides vital plot details to surprise the reader and make a point. For example, the narrator initially introduces Jim as Jack’s helpful father. According to the narrator, Jim is trying to help his son figure out the hostage case. However, at the end of the novel, the narrator reveals that Jim’s been keeping a vital secret from Jack: He let the bank robber go free. The narrator also initially hides the bank robber’s identity from the reader, referring to the bank robber in gender-neutral language. However, toward the end of the story, the narrator reveals that the bank robber is a woman. The narrator also doesn’t immediately reveal that the apartment used in the hostage drama belongs to Estelle, nor do they immediately make clear the nature of Zara’s connection to Nadia. These stylistic and narrative choices speak to the novel’s interest in how people form judgments and in how often those judgments prove incorrect.
For example, by not immediately telling the reader that the bank robber is a woman, the narrator invites the reader to confront their own biases about why they originally thought the bank robber was a man. Similarly, by not telling the reader about Jim, the narrator allows the reader to make judgments that are later complicated when the truth comes out. The latter case is particularly telling, as it implicitly questions why the reader (presumably) assumes that Jim would be “helping” Jack by aiding him in his efforts to apprehend the bank robber. This assumption takes for granted that Jack’s absolutist view of morality is correct—that the bank robber is a bad and dangerous person who needs to be caught. However, the novel’s events reveal this to be fundamentally incorrect. If Jim had helped Jack catch the robber, he would be doing a disservice not only to her but to Jack himself.
The novel thus uses the misperceptions of characters and readers alike to develop its ideas about empathy, which snap judgments are likely to impede. This informs the narrator’s philosophical asides, which typically expose the inadequacy of abstract moral reasoning when applied to particular cases. For example, the narrator poses the question of whether it is acceptable to steal if it doesn’t hurt anyone else and is done for survival. In such instances, the narrator suggests that life isn’t binary; people shouldn’t be labeled as good or bad before one knows the whole story. Most people are just doing the best they can with what they’ve been given, and readers should have compassion for this human plight rather than judgment.
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By Fredrik Backman
