War & Peace Quote by August Strindberg

Strindberg doesn’t romanticize fatherhood; he indicts it as a role engineered to curdle into resentment. “Provider for all” is the official job description, the part society applauds in speeches and sermons. “Enemy of all” is the lived experience: the father becomes the household’s designated obstacle, the person who says no, sets limits, measures costs, and turns desire into arithmetic. The sting comes from how fast the sentence pivots from civic virtue to social exile, as if those two positions are structurally linked rather than accidentally paired.

The line also exposes a grim economic psychology. When care is expressed primarily through provision, affection gets routed through wages, rules, and scarcity. Love becomes managerial. Gratitude becomes a debt nobody wants to acknowledge. In that setup, the father can’t win: if he provides, he’s controlling; if he withholds, he’s cruel; if he falters, he’s useless. Strindberg’s “thankless” isn’t just hurt pride. It’s a critique of a family system that turns intimacy into a ledger and assigns one person the role of enforcer.

Context matters: Strindberg wrote in a late-19th-century Sweden wrestling with modernization, class pressure, and changing gender roles, and his work is famously combative about marriage and domestic power. The line reads like a dramatist’s compressed stage direction: the father enters as benefactor, exits as villain. Not because he’s inherently monstrous, but because the script demands one.