The Girl Who Played With Fire Themes

Little Words, Big Ideas

Identity

The early sections of The Girl Who Played With Fire feature Lisbeth Salander trying to reconstruct her identity. Having the billions of kronor she stole in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo makes thi...

Friendship

Lisbeth Salander is so used to having people hate her, she can't believe that she has any real friends. As she tries to prove her innocence and discover the truth about her past, a small army of su...

Family

In The Girl Who Played With Fire, family isn't all it's cracked up to be. Think Ben Stiller has it bad when he has to meet Robert De Niro in Meet the Parents? Well, Alexander Zalachenko, Salander's...

Gender

It isn't hard to tell the good men from the bad men in a Stieg Larsson novel. If they are good, they are respectful in the way they treat, speak to, and think about women. The bad men use the words...

Violence

The Girl Who Played With Fire is loaded with all manner of violent acts. It has shoot-outs, tase-downs, beatings, fire bombs, rapes and other forms of sexual violence, murders, dismemberments, and...

Sex

The Girl Who Played With Fire offers the best and the worst of sex. Most of the novel's good guys have unconventional sex lives which seem meant to challenge how we feel about things like same-sex...

Criminality

There are so many criminals in The Girl Who Played With Fire we can barely keep count. Many of these criminals are those who are supposed to be fighting crime, not engaging in it. We have journalis...

Isolation

The Girl Who Played With Fire is big on isolated settings, like Salander's lonely apartment and her cell in the psychiatric ward. There are also isolated cabins, warehouses, and farms in remote loc...

Justice and Judgment

Justice and Judgment is an important theme in any Stieg Larsson novel. Since Salander is a vigilante who often commits crimes in her pursuit of rough justice, our notions of justice are constantly...

Technology and Modernization

In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, technology is an integral part in solving the novel's mysteries and exposing the criminals. In The Girl Who Played With Fire, not so much – here technology...