Nothing

Everything is nothing. Nothing matters. From the moment you are born, you start to die. The central idea of this nightmarish story is the strain to find the meaning and the significance of things and creatures – of life as a whole. A bunch of classmates, between the ages of 13 and 14, are making extreme sacrifices in order to convince their classmate Pierre Anthon, who’s sitting in the plum tree and refuses to come down, that there are things in life which do matter and which do indeed have a meaning.

Written in a heinous and, partly, in a farcical way, this story, unfortunately, has no happy ending. However, it makes one think about what kind of frightening things young peole can put into practice when they act as a group. Every member of a group feels themselves pushed and influenced by others. And the book also shows us how little it actually takes to go berserk in such circumstances. At the end of the story, the main character Agnes starts to have doubts because, after all, significance and meaning can be relative concepts. In the end, she realizes that life itself is what matters the most – the very life that one is living right now. Knowing this, she feels that she can go on with her own.