The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“This young, inconsequential foreigner, Brigge, will have to sit down, five stories up, and write, day and night: yes, he'll have to write, that's what will have to happen.”

Brigge refers to himself in the third person to burden himself with the responsibility of writing something insightful. The use of the third person creates a narrative space between Brigge the narrator and Brigge the character. Brigge the narrator feels overwhelmed by what he wants to accomplish, and he turns this anxiety on to Brigge the character, which, in theory, he can control.

“Sometimes I give them a couple of coppers and tremble in case they refuse them.”

When Brigge donates money to the poor, he is paying to have his social status reaffirmed. He comes from a wealthy family and wants to be assured that he has not lost the last lingering traces of social superiority that he believes he possesses. His fear that they will reject his donation represents his fear that the poor will see him as their equal, destroying his fantasy of specialness and forcing him to deal with the reality of his poverty.

“Laughter was gushing from their mouths like pus from a sore.”

The more Brigge examines the world around him, the more it disgusts him. He describes laughter as being like "pus from a sore," framing an expression of joy and happiness as an open wound that abhors him. Society is infected, but instead of healing itself, it revels in its disease.

“I prayed for my childhood and it has come back, and I feel it is still just as heavy as it was then, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.”

Though at 28 Brigge has been through a great deal since his childhood, he does not believe that he has quite reached the level of maturity needed to leave his anxieties behind. Instead, he now has more eloquence and perspective to give voice to these anxieties. He is able to describe them in greater detail, to observe them everywhere, and to extrapolate deeper meaning from these anxieties, making them seem even more pronounced than ever before.

“I am a beginner in the circumstances of my own life.”

Brigge, for all his life experiences, never feels assured or mature enough to astutely observe the world around him. The more he observes, the more he realizes he does not understand the true complexity of life. As such, he feels paralyzed, unable to act and make decisions that will improve his circumstances. He continually returns to his childhood in an effort to understand this immaturity, rather than moving forward.

“Oh Malte, our lives pass so quickly and it seems to me that we're all so distracted and preoccupied and don't pay proper attention when we pass on.”

Brigge is haunted by the idea that people are untethered from their lives and unable to take the time necessary to reflect on existence, much in the same way that several ghosts haunt his family. These ghosts pass through the family gatherings, seemingly unconnected to the world, just as the characters pass through society without forming a true connection to their society or those around them.

“If there were words for what had happened, I was too small to find any.”

The more Brigge writes, the more he feels that his words are woefully inadequate to express the complexity of life. Like a child, he feels himself to be "too small" to meet life’s challenges both in terms of expression and action.

“We had a different notion of the fantastic.”

Brigge has had several supernatural experiences. As a result, the idea of fairy tales and supernatural stories seems absurd because to him, these things are real. He and his mother prefer nonfiction stores because their life is fantastical enough already, providing them with a "different notion of the fantastic" than people who have lived without contact with the supernatural.

“Sieversen told the story until her dying day of how I had collapsed and how they had just carried on laughing, thinking that collapsing was part of the show.”

Brigge's memory of collapsing in front of his family and the domestic servants traumatized him. They laughed at him, assuming that his collapse was part of an act. In the same way, Brigge's poverty and suffering seems disconnected from reality. Brigge’s inability to be taken seriously by those around him plagues him, making him self-conscious that there is something about him that people interpret as trivial or insincere. This self-doubt is why he struggles to see himself as mature enough to write.

“I had the feeling that we owed each other some form of contact, and I would have loved to find out something about him that was authentic.”

Brigge, for all his fears and anxieties, possesses a genuine yearning to know more about the world. The people he observes on the streets of Paris may terrify and abhor him on occasion, but he forces himself to look at them and sympathize with them. He wants to know more about their authentic experiences as he feels that he owes a debt to the world. He feels required to understand the society he inhabits, even if he feels alienated from that society.

“She isn't in it.”

Erik wants to give a mirror to the ghost of Catherine because he knows that the portrait of herself that she is seeking does not really exist. In the same way, he knows that she will not be able to appear in the mirror (because she is a ghost). Catherine, when she is dead and while she was alive, is unknowable. She does not know herself, so she is denied the opportunity for self-observation and understanding which would be achieved through a mirror or portrait.

“It was as if he had been waiting for her end so as to be able to die heedlessly, which is what he needed.”

Brigge's father can only truly embrace the reckless nature of his own death once he has felt the palpable loss of his wife. He embraces her death with a reckless abandon, a nihilistic acknowledgement of the vast abyss of unknowing that now separates him from the woman he loved.

“We are in an age when houses are being stripped of everything they contain, they can hold nothing any more.”

To Brigge, the richness of his youth is lost in the modern age. Whether by time or poverty, he feels as though he has been stripped of his sense of self and left as an undecorated, unremarkable shell that is barely able to remain standing.

“I realized that all the clearly visible grown-ups who had just been talking and laughing were now walking around stooped over and occupied with something invisible.”

Early on, Brigge realizes that people lead a double life; a life that others can see and private concerns and emotions that remain hidden. The invisible lives of others give Brigge an objective, something he needs to understand in the world so that he can understand himself.

“I wasn't thinking about my own heart. And when I did reflect upon it later, I knew for certain for the first time that it wasn't relevant here.”

After watching the piercing of his dead father's heart, Brigge feels disconnected from the world. The ritual is a denouement to the life of his father, a final act which confirms that the man is dead and cannot return. Just as the old man's heart is punctured, Brigge feels as though he should feel a metaphorical puncturing of his own heart. When this pang of grief does not come, however, he only feels more alienated from the world.

“It would admittedly be more a history of the symptoms of illnesses that they have induced in me.”

In his attempts to understand the world and to turn this understanding into writing, Brigge focuses on negativity. He understands others through their pain, particularly through pain that they have caused him. Most of the stories of his childhood end with him being made to feel guilt, fear, or shame by his family members. These childhood experiences created a frame in which Brigge’s experiences in the world can only alienate him, and he does not know how to gain a different, positive perspective.

“For human beings – if it's possible to compare them momentarily with lids of this kind – fit their occupations most poorly and reluctantly.”

Unlike the tin lids Brigge describes, human lives are not precisely engineered to fit together. Human lives lack the care and the precision of design as their purposes are not ever truly revealed. There are too many flaws in the production process, inducing traumas and errors in people that mean that they are never truly suited for life in a prefabricated society.

“At some point that very book got amongst my own books, and is one of the few books from which I will not be parted.”

Brigge holds on to this book not because of its contents but because of the emotional context in which it came into his possession. Brigge, by his own admission, is not a great reader. However, he is a reader of people, and the sentimental value of a book has great meaning. He appreciates that he was given the book and that he was read stories from the book more than he appreciates the stories themselves. In this sense, the true story of the book is the meta-textual story about how it came into Brigge's possession.

“The abjectness of his misery, not mitigated by any wariness or pretense, was beyond anything I might be able to convey.”

Brigge feels his limitations as a writer, but he believes that these are not necessarily due to his lack of talent. Rather, he attributes his failures to the sheer scale of the horror and the misery that he is trying to coney. The more that he observes the world, the more horrified he becomes, and the more he realizes that mere language cannot contain the true depth of the misery that he has witnessed. This paradox defines Brigge’s character and makes his success impossible.

“What was fateful about these dramatized poems was how they constantly supplemented and extended themselves and swelled to tens of thousands of lines, so that the time that they represented was ultimately real time.”

The attempt to write an accurate portrayal of the world through poetry quickly spirals out of control. The poems swell to "tens of thousands of lines" as Brigge struggles to contain the complexity of the misery he tries to reflect. This complexity is Brigge's greatest challenge, as he does not want to undermine his own work by not including it, but by acknowledging it, he is admitting that his work will never truly be complete.

“It seems to him that the utmost he can do is to be alone and wakeful and for her sake to be thinking how much in the right that woman was in her way of loving.”

Brigge finds parallels with his own life in those around him, as well as in fiction and history. He knows the importance of loving from a distance in a philosophical manner but acknowledges that this prevents him from actually connecting with anyone on a personal level. If he does love someone so intensely, he fears he will inevitably break them. Loving from a distance is a limitation Brigge accepts in his own life so as not to do too much harm to the world.

“The true Venice, awake, brittle almost to the point of shattering, not at all dreamlike.”

Brigge documents the extent to which Venice charms so many tourists, but he insists that he sees through the artificiality of the Italian city. To others, the romance of the city is preferable to reality, and they would prefer to exist in this dreamworld. Brigge cannot do so. He cannot reject reality in favor of a pleasant and comfortable lie.

“Being loved means to be consumed by fire.”

Brigge's pessimism shows how the act of being loved (rather than loving) is harmful. To him, such an act is so all-consuming that it is destructive. Love is a powerful instrument which—in Brigge's life— has only brought suffering and harm. As a result, he is wary of loving anyone.