The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest Themes

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest Themes

Friendship

Friendship is the backbone of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, maybe the backbone of the whole Millennium trilogy. We could look at the saga as Lisbeth Salander's journey from finding few fri...

Ethics and Morality

Readers have the ultimate say on what's right and what's wrong in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Each character has a distinct, and sometimes bizarre, moral code as a guide, for good or bad...

Justice and Judgment

In The Girl Who Played With Fire, Salander is judged by the media and much of the Stockholm police force as a murderous psychopath who deserves to be locked away for life, and in The Girl Who Kicke...

Gender

Stieg Larsson's trilogy is very focused on problems women face, especially violence and social inequality. Lisbeth Salander is probably the character that prompts the most discussion of gender. On...

Violence

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest has its share of gruesome violence, including depictions of rape, child molestation, and horror chambers where women are held against their wills. During Salan...

Lies and Deceit

As we discuss in the related theme of "Versions of Reality," the Section and Teleborian build an elaborate castle of lies and deceit in order to silence and discredit Salander. To keep their castle...

Language and Communication

Overall, this theme is concerned with language and communication as evidence, as news, and as history. It's concerned with how people, government agents, the media, and professionals like doctors a...

Technology and Modernization

In The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, we watch Salander surpass her hacker-teacher, Plague, and get into all sorts of technological mischief, all in the name of truth and justice. Internet and...

Versions of Reality

We see The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest from different characters' points of view. These characters are basically divided into two categories: those motivated to uncover the truth and those mo...