The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Themes

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo features extremes of friends and enemies. Mikael Blomkvist and Erika Berger's twenty-year friendship is the cornerstone of their lives, yet it isolates others they m...

Some of the moral and ethical issues in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are straightforward: Nazism = bad; murder, rape, torture, physical abuse = bad; global financial fraud and organized crime =...

The family drama in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo takes on soap-opera proportions. The Vanger family is super wealthy and influential but, as Blomkvist soon learns, also "clearly dysfunctional" (...

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo moves back and forth between consensual, pleasant sex and hideous rapes. The positive, happy sex (of which there's a fair amount) is sexy but understated, without gr...

We've got a very violent novel on our hands here. Much of the violence in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is sexual, but other forms of physical violence plus verbal and psychological violence are...

A big chunk of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is set on a remote Swedish island mostly owned and inhabited by the Vanger family. It also features several isolated cabins, a bedroom torture chamber...

The 36-year-old mystery of Harriet Vanger makes The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo seem like one gigantic cold case. Blomkvist and Salander journey deep in Vanger family history, struggling, like the...

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo celebrates unofficial agents of justice and finds official justice wanting. Blomkvist is almost official. He works with official bodies, not against them, though he'...

Sexy sleuths Salander and Blomkvist love their technology and they sure need it for their work. Computers and other reproductive technology (printing, photography) are integral to the plot. While g...