Drunkenness made the father unpredictable and invalidated the narrator’s childhood map of him

Evidence

Or was it just that he was drunk? I thought. Because I wasn’t used to that either. My father had never been a drinker. The first time I saw him in an inebriated state was one evening only two months before when I visited him and Unni in the flat in Elvegate, and was served fondue, another thing which he would never have considered remotely possible in his own home on a Friday night. They had been drinking before I arrived, and although he was kindness itself, it was threatening nonetheless; not directly, of course, because, sitting there, I didn’t fear him, but indirectly because I could no longer read him. It was as if all the knowledge I had acquired about him through my childhood, and which enabled me to prepare for any eventuality, was, in one fell swoop, invalid. So what was valid? — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1041

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the soft/hard instability of paragraph 1026 — the father’s loss of grip on himself.