”En måste dö för folket för att icke hela folket skulle förgås” : Syndabocksmotivet i Birgitta Trotzigs verk En berättelse från kusten

Sammanfattning: This essay aims to examine the scapegoat motif in Birgitta Trotzig's novel En berättelse från kusten (1961). The important part is to study how the scapegoat motif is portrayed in the novel, how the plot leads to persecution and final sacrifice and how it is related to the novel as a whole. I discuss the term scapegoat through the French theoretician René Girard, who developed some criteria to be met in order to the scapegoat motif to work. The essay results show that the three stages in Girard's theories exist in the novel. At first a great disease that causes children of almost every family to die and it makes the society to slowly collapse. The frustration leads to a search for a cause to the disease, however not the real cause, rather a crime and someone to blame. Someone, is not just anyone, the person has some distinctive victims markers. The scapegoat, Merete, is both socially and physically aberrant and that makes her the perfect scapegoat. The result shows that her death is a ritual reconciliation that ends the chaos and makes people free of the guilt they felt. This motif is also a part of a bigger reconciliation theme. Everything seems to weave into a pattern that requires suffering and great sacrifice to achieve reconciliation. Both the city and the monastery's restoration required suffering where Merete and Apelone both suffered and died to save the whole nation from perish.