Lagerkvist has apparently called himself a "religious sceptic." His novels have a curious unfinality about them, for their characters never come to their proper reward, never gain the solace suffering is supposed to bring. In manifestly Christian fiction, the main characters seem completed by their faith, whether that faith has temporal reward or not. In explicit existential fiction, generally the protagonist achieves some sort of pride, even happiness, in his incompleteness. But for the religious sceptic, like Lagerkvist, there is neither fulfillment nor pride. Humility, very human love, tenuous community, striving—these are the "rewards" of such a world. They are universal conditions, but they are not rigidly defined. In other words, they do not congeal into dogma. In the Lagerkvist scheme of things there are no conclusions, no party lines, no givens. As near to Christian as the basic tenets are, they are not locked into doctrine. In Barabbas, the Christian enclave ignores and then purges Barabbas, the truer seeker. Christ himself is said to have cursed Ahasuerus in The Death of Ahasuerus. And the Christians in The Dwarf are generally materialistic and vicious beings, even sadistic in their faith. Lagerkvist consistently attacks those who are so meager of spirit that they accept the narrow word and in consequence reject the spirit of religious law. (p. 98)
As a brief against the acceptance of dogma, The Dwarf holds no truth as self-evident. The misapprehension of events by the dwarf serves the important literary purpose of portraying insubstantial knowledge directly; no other technique could as well have evoked the reader's dissatisfaction with answers and judgments. We cannot trust the dwarf, just as we cannot trust the evidence of this world or the "evidence" of an otherworld…. Like Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov in some of their fictions, Lagerkvist has created a narrator whose conclusions leave the reader ill at ease. The brilliant use of the memoir format in The Dwarf accomplishes the sceptical attitude in the most immediate, almost visceral way by encouraging doubt in the reader himself. In effect, the unreliable narrator is the meaning of the novel.
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