Character Clues

Character Analysis

Actions

Per Hansa hits a pretty big fork in the road when he finds wooden stakes claiming his friends' farms for other people. He could do the honest thing and leave the stakes, or he could pull them up and destroy any evidence of other people being there.

He decides to go with the second option, which ends up driving a huge wedge (or stake, maybe) between him and his more moral wife, Beret. Their relationship is never really the same after this incident. Unfortunately, the one time that Per Hansa does give in to Beret's morals is when he goes out to fetch a minister for his friend Hans and dies of hypothermia in the process. Go figure.

Direct Characterization

O.E. Rölvaag is happy to use actions to show you what his characters are like. But he's also not afraid to straight up tell you what a certain character is like. This book is long enough as it is, and it would be way longer if O.E. held himself to the "Show, don't tell" rule all the time. He and his readers are both better off when he just paraphrases what a character is like and then gets on with the plot.

Family Life

Every member of Per Hansa's family is defined by how they relate to the other members. Beret, for example, loves her husband and children. But she badly wishes she lived in a town so she could have other people to talk to.

Meanwhile, Per Hansa is happy to ignore his family as long as he gets to work on his fields all day. The two sons, Store-Hans and Ole, try to outdo one another in order to establish themselves as the second "man" of the household. And while everyone is off doing their own thing, there isn't a whole lot of family bonding going on. The closest thing we see to bonding is in Per Hansa's and Beret's separate reactions to their youngest baby, Peter Victorious.

Location

When Per Hansa moves his family to the Dakota Territory from Norway, they leave behind everything they've ever known. Their new home gives them a chance to build new personalities, but all it really ends up doing is exaggerating certain traits they already had in them.

Beret, for example, has always felt insecure about her marriage to Per because she married him after getting pregnant out of wedlock. The vast landscape of Dakota ends up bringing all of her deepest anxieties to the surface and eventually causes her to have a mental breakdown.

Ole and Store-Hans, on the other hand, use the wilderness as a space where they can prove their manhood. And as for Per Hansa, he's over the moon with happiness because he is a proud man who wants to go down in history as a great settler of the American prairies.

Names

Beret and the neighbors get worried when Per Hansa decides to name his baby son (seriously ) Peter Victorious. The baby only barely survived its birth, and with nothing but harsh wilderness all around the Norwegian settlement, the neighbors worry that Hansa might be tempting fate by giving his son such a bold name.

But Hansa isn't worried. He's convinced that his son will do great things with his life. Hansa thinks of Peter Victorious as part of his legacy, since Peter is the only one of Per Hansa's sons to be born on American soil. The boy's name ultimately becomes a symbol of the pride that ends up driving a wedge between Per and his family.