How The Nature Of Change In To Kill A Child By Stig Dagerman

Stig Dagerman (1923 –1954) was one of Sweden’s most famous authors. He was well known for his short fictions, one of which being his story entitled To Kill a Child. Dagerman was commissioned by the National Society for Road Safety to write a story that would encourage Swedish motorists to stop speeding--a difficult social issue which was resulting in serious consequences for public safety. A simple story intended for a public safety campaign eventually became one of the greatest and most powerful short fictions of all time. Upon analysis of Dagerman’s short story, To Kill a Child, one can confer that the story depicts the nature of change in society. Change is uncontrollable, non-discriminatory, and irreversible.
Change in the form of tragedies

It becomes clear that the story is leading to an uncontrollable crisis. In the opening scene, Dagerman begins by stating that it is a “pleasant morning of an evil day, because on this day a child will be killed in the third village by a cheerful man” (Dagerman). Throughout the story Dagerman gives the man the characteristic of ”cheerful" and describes his car as having “no dents in it, nor was it red with blood’ (Dagerman). These are traits of a character with no intentions of killing a child, although that is exactly what

A mother chooses to bake for her family, a father and son await to go fishing, a "cheerful" and "carefree" man plans to rent a boat and row far out in the sea accompanied by another woman–nothing out of the ordinary, everything seems perfect and in control. However, when the child is killed, the plans of each character drastically transform and become out of their hands. The mother, instead of watching her child grow, will now have to live a life of regret and guilt, constantly replaying the events in her head and wishing she had never let her son out of her sight. The father, instead of going fishing with his son, will have to call family members and tell them that they will never see his son again. A once cheerful man will have to deal with the grief of killing a child for the rest of his life. After a single incident, their lives are changed without any warning at all. As is says in the text, "because life is constructed in such a merciless fashion, even one minute before a cheerful man kills a child he can still feel entirely at ease" (Dagerman), displaying the nature of how quickly things change, and how out of control our lives are because of