"It was a powerful little creature"

On speach, silence and suppression in Laila Stien's short story "Markblomster"

Abstract

In Laila Stien’s short story «Markblomster», the narrator recounts the story of her brother and his relationship to Alice, a city girl who ends up taking her own life by driving their car into the ocean. This article analyses the short story with particular focus on how the narrator uses strategies to take control over the suicide narrative, and actively suppresses the perspective of the deceased. This control method is examined within the broader tendency to frame suicide narratives in metaphors of silence. Furthermore, this is interpreted as an expression of what Peter Wessel Zapffe, in On the Tragic (1941), calls suppression, i.e. maintaining decorum to preserve what he terms the autotelic hope. Via Zapffe’s theory of tragedy, I argue that the tragic potential of the short story cannot be limited to the individual suicide but also, through the narrator’s narrative strategies, reveals a human need to suppress the tragic aspects of existence as such.