In a Dutch city a year and a half after World War II, 23-year-old office clerk Frits van Egters drifts through ten dark December evenings—drinking, wandering, provoking friends, and chafing against his parents—while death-haunted dreams creep into his restless nights.
Some jobs are pure motion with no result: you take cards out of a file, then put them back in, and that is all. Described plainly, such work reveals how a whole day can be used up without anything changing, and invites the suspicion that much of life is the same shuffling.
When nothing happens, ordinary sensations swell until they fill the mind. A singing kettle becomes unbearable, the smell of one's own bedsheets becomes a puzzle about whether others would sense it the same way, and an empty house sends someone reaching for music just to cope.
With nothing to do, a person keeps checking the clock and scolding himself for waking too early, for sitting still, for letting half the day slip by. He makes small plans to improve, like an evening walk to sleep better, yet still feels he can do nothing at all. Idleness does not feel restful. It becomes a steady low-grade guilt.
In a tense household, resentment rarely surfaces as an open fight. It comes out in complaints about a drink that was boiled too early, a missing object, or who stayed in bed too long. Calling an argument a "friendly debate" only adds a layer of ironic distance to the tension.
A young man haunted by dreams of coffins and rotting bodies turns his dread on the people nearest him. He narrates his aging parents' decline as hopeless, and jokes that he is waiting for the household to end in violence. Cruel commentary becomes a way to hold at arm's length the decay he fears in himself.