Fear, Love, and Isolation in Someone Is Going to Come by Jon Fosse
When I first read Someone Is Going to Come, I found myself lingering in its pauses. The silence between lines seemed louder than the words themselves. Jon Fosse doesn’t craft his novel around action or complexity. Instead, he strips everything away until only raw emotion remains. What’s left is something unsettling, fragile, and deeply intimate.
This novel is about a couple — He and She — who move to a remote house by the sea, wanting to be alone together. But even in isolation, they can’t escape the fear that someone else might arrive. That dread, unnamed and shapeless, haunts every sentence. Fosse makes silence and stillness the central characters, and he does so with language that feels both primitive and poetic.
I think the book speaks less to our minds and more to something buried deeper. It’s not a story you understand; it’s one you feel. The tension builds not from what happens, but from what might happen. That sense of possibility, of waiting, is unbearable — and that’s the point. You begin to realize that the greatest fear is not the arrival of someone, but the changes that presence brings to love and solitude.
In this review, I want to explore the fragile beauty of Someone Is Going to Come, how it speaks about relationships, fear, and the unrelenting presence of absence. It may not be for every reader, but those who listen closely will find something unforgettable.
Inside Someone Is Going to Come: When nothing happens, everything happens
What’s fascinating about Someone Is Going to Come is that it works against narrative expectations. There’s no dramatic plot twist, no shocking event. Instead, we are drawn into a slow, repetitive rhythm — one that mirrors the couple’s inner turmoil. They speak in echoes, circling around the same fears. And somehow, that repetition becomes suspense.
The novel’s style is minimalist, but that doesn’t mean it’s lacking. Every word matters. Every silence has weight. Fosse writes as if he’s peeling away noise to reach something truer. The couple’s desire to be alone is not peaceful — it’s suffocating. As much as they seek solitude, they’re afraid of what it reveals.
What strikes me most is how the book captures the claustrophobia of love. The house by the sea is both sanctuary and prison. It isolates them from the world but amplifies their insecurities. The fear that “someone is going to come” becomes a symbol — for intrusion, for jealousy, for change. Even the arrival of a stranger, the Man, doesn’t bring violence or conflict. But his mere presence shifts everything.
👉 A Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell also explores internal fear and psychological enclosure, though in a very different setting. Both novels deal with characters confronting invisible pressures — society in Orwell’s case, and the weight of one’s own thoughts in Fosse’s.
Fosse asks us to read slowly. To listen for the quiet tremors inside his characters. In doing so, we realize how fragile connection really is — and how terrifying it can be to let someone in.
Love in Repetition: The Rhythm of Obsession
Reading Jon Fosse feels like being caught in a tide. His sentences ebb and flow, pulling you into the rhythm of his characters’ voices. In Someone Is Going to Come, this rhythm becomes a kind of heartbeat — slow, persistent, trembling with doubt. The characters repeat phrases, thoughts, and fears. And that repetition, far from redundant, becomes a way to expose obsession.
It’s as if He and She are rehearsing their fears aloud, trying to convince themselves that everything is fine. But their words betray them. They don’t trust each other. They don’t trust the silence. And they certainly don’t trust the idea that their love is strong enough to withstand intrusion.
This is where Fosse’s minimalist style becomes emotional maximalism. He uses very little to say a great deal. The pauses and repeated lines reflect emotional loops — especially jealousy. The fear that one’s partner might prefer another is never directly addressed, but it ripples through the book like a quiet storm.
What I found haunting is how Fosse makes love feel fragile simply through language. The lovers aren’t shouting; they’re whispering. And yet, the effect is more devastating than any loud argument. The stillness between them speaks of wounds that haven’t yet been named.
👉 Arch of Triumph by Erich Maria Remarque also paints love during instability — though political and external, rather than internal. Both novels show that love, even when deeply desired, doesn’t always offer safety.
Fosse holds up a mirror to the kind of love that feeds on its own fear. And in doing so, he shows how language can both connect and destroy.
A Place to Hide or a Place to Be Found?
The house by the sea is more than a setting — it’s a character. It breathes with the couple’s hopes and anxieties. They believe it will protect their love from the outside world, but the house betrays them. It becomes a space of projection, echoing their inner fears. Solitude does not bring peace; it magnifies everything.
The remoteness of the place intensifies their longing to disappear. But it also makes them more vulnerable. She feels watched. He feels challenged. Their unity fractures not because of something said or done, but simply because of where they are. The silence is too loud.
Fosse’s genius is in his use of space and setting as emotional amplifiers. The sea that surrounds the house becomes both threat and metaphor. It represents endlessness — a place where the self can vanish. But it also mirrors the isolation that eats away at intimacy. The couple sought retreat, but they found confrontation.
This chapter made me think of 👉 The Method by Juli Zeh, where environments meant to protect become mechanisms of control. In both novels, setting is not neutral — it has agency.
The house does not trap them physically. It traps them emotionally. In their attempts to be alone, they become too exposed. That’s the paradox Fosse explores so well: to be alone with someone you love may be the loneliest thing of all.
The Stranger Who Says So Little, and Changes Everything
Midway through the novel, a third character appears — the Man. He doesn’t bring chaos. He doesn’t say much. But his presence unsettles everything. Fosse doesn’t give us drama in a traditional sense; instead, he introduces a human variable that exposes what was already fragile. The Man becomes a mirror. He reflects the couple’s insecurities, their mistrust, and their unspoken doubts.
What’s remarkable is how little the Man actually does. He simply exists. Yet his existence threatens the couple’s bond. His gaze, his movement, his silence — they all chip away at the illusion of safety. Suddenly, “being alone together” doesn’t feel like unity anymore. It feels like surveillance, like exposure.
The fear that “someone is going to come” has now materialized. But the real fear wasn’t about the stranger at all. It was about what his presence reveals: that their love was always more brittle than they wanted to admit.
👉 The Lover by Marguerite Duras offers a different, yet equally haunting dynamic of presence and silence. In both books, tension builds not through action but through the weight of being seen by another.
Fosse suggests that love cannot exist in a vacuum. The arrival of another — even a quiet, passive one — is enough to disturb the emotional balance. And once that balance shifts, there’s no way to pretend it was ever stable.
The Space Between Words: Fosse’s Unique Use of Language
One of the most distinctive aspects of Jon Fosse’s writing is how he uses language to create absence. His dialogue is sparse, his sentences often incomplete. Yet these gaps are not empty. They are filled with emotional residue — fear, longing, regret. The silence between words says more than the words themselves.
In Someone Is Going to Come, the way characters speak reveals how poorly they communicate. Their phrases repeat, trail off, contradict. They seem trapped in a fog of their own making. But this fog is intentional. It forces us to lean in, to read between the lines.
Fosse’s style demands something rare from the reader: patience. You don’t race through his books. You wait with them and you feel their stillness. And in that stillness, you begin to experience the emotional reality of the characters — not through exposition, but through rhythm, hesitation, and breath.
This reminds me of 👉 The Counterfeiters by André Gide. While stylistically different, both authors use form to explore inner fragmentation. Gide’s metafictional layers and Fosse’s minimalist gaps share a common aim — to portray emotion as something disjointed, unstable, and always in flux.
Fosse turns the unsaid into a language of its own. And once you tune into it, the silence becomes deafening — and strangely beautiful.
Haunting Quotes from Someone Is Going to Come by Jon Fosse
- “Someone is going to come.” This phrase repeats like a mantra throughout the book, turning anticipation into obsession. It captures the fear of intrusion — but more than that, the fear of change.
- “We’ll be alone. Just the two of us.” What begins as comfort slowly turns into a trap. The promise of solitude becomes suffocating, exposing how little certainty exists in love.
- “We have come here to be alone.” The couple’s motivation sounds simple, even romantic. But with Fosse, even plain words carry dread. This line reveals how illusions of control quickly unravel.
- “I don’t want anyone to come.” The fear of others echoes a deeper anxiety: the fear that connection with the outside world will destroy the fragile inner world they’ve built.
- “There’s no one here. Just us.” As the novel progresses, this reassurance begins to ring hollow. The absence of others becomes a void filled with tension rather than peace.
- “You think he’s going to come?” The paranoia intensifies. This line underscores how doubt, once introduced, feeds on itself. The fear of ‘the other’ becomes a wedge between the lovers.
- “He looked at you.” A moment of ordinary observation turns into accusation. Fosse shows how easily attention — or the suggestion of it — can destabilize closeness.
- “We don’t need anyone else.” The desire for exclusivity masks an undercurrent of insecurity. This line marks the boundary between intimacy and isolation — a boundary that soon dissolves.
Trivia Facts from Someone Is Going to Come
- Fosse’s first full-length play: Someone Is Going to Come was Jon Fosse’s debut as a playwright in 1996, marking his transition from novelist to one of the most important dramatists of our time.
- Influenced by Beckett and Bernhard: The play echoes the style of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, particularly in its rhythmic repetition and psychological tension, though Fosse’s tone is uniquely lyrical.
- Recurring theme of “waiting”: The obsessive phrase “someone is going to come” places the play within a long tradition of dramatic works about waiting — from Waiting for Godot to 👉 Time Must Have a Stop by Aldous Huxley.
- Published by Éditions de l’Arche: The French translation by Éditions de l’Arche helped cement Fosse’s presence in the Francophone world. Source: Editions-Arche.fr
- The play’s existential subtext: While the plot is minimal, critics have noted existential themes throughout. The characters’ fear of “the other” reflects a deeper dread of meaninglessness.
- Place of isolation: The house by the sea in the play mirrors typical settings in Fosse’s works — often inspired by the desolate fjords and coastline of western Norway, where he grew up.
- Adapted internationally for stage: Someone Is Going to Come has been staged in over 20 countries. The 2001 French premiere at the Théâtre de l’Odéon helped establish Fosse’s European fame. 👉 The Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre also found lasting resonance on French stages.
- Fosse’s Catholic conversion: Though raised Protestant, Fosse converted to Catholicism in 2012. His spiritual beliefs now inform later works and cast earlier ones like this play in a new light.
The Fear That Love Is Not Enough
Throughout the novel, the characters act as if love is their refuge — the one thing they can trust. But with each page, that trust crumbles. Fosse shows us something difficult to accept: love does not always equal understanding. You can love someone deeply and still feel alone. You can share a life and still speak in echoes.
Their fears aren’t irrational. They’re raw and human. What if love fades and what if the other drifts away? What if simply being together isn’t enough to hold everything in place? Fosse doesn’t answer these questions. He lets them hang, suspended in the still air between two people afraid of losing each other — or maybe, already lost.
This emotional fragility reminded me of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani. In both books, the past is filled with imagined safety, and the present slowly exposes how fragile that safety always was.
Fosse doesn’t give us catharsis. He gives us emotional claustrophobia, and the result is devastating. We see the characters trying to believe in something — love, solitude, connection — but the belief itself starts to dissolve. And we’re left watching them sink into the silence they once welcomed.
Isolation as a Form of Exposure
It’s easy to assume that isolation will shield you. The characters in this novel certainly think so. They believe that if they go far enough from others, they’ll finally be safe. But the truth is that isolation reveals rather than conceals. With no one else to distract them, they must face each other — and themselves.
Fosse’s seaside house becomes a crucible. It concentrates every emotion, every silence, every misstep. There are no doors to slam, no friends to call, no streets to disappear into. Just two people, their fears, and the sound of waves they can’t control.
What struck me most is how exposure doesn’t come from outside. It rises from within. The characters’ doubts, barely voiced, become unbearable. And the arrival of the Man — the outsider — isn’t the true disruption. The real fracture is already there. They were never sure of each other to begin with.
👉 The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner also explores this slow unraveling, where isolation deepens inner disarray rather than bringing peace. Both novels remind us that the most painful truths don’t come from confrontation — they come from stillness.
In Fosse’s world, being alone is never simple. It’s never peaceful. It’s a mirror turned inward. And sometimes, the hardest thing is not what others do to us, but what we see when we’re left with only ourselves.
Why I’ll Keep Returning to Someone Is Going to Come
Reading Someone Is Going to Come is not like reading a typical novel. It doesn’t carry you forward with plot twists or revelations. Instead, it asks you to stop — to feel the atmosphere, to sit with the discomfort, to listen for things left unsaid. It’s not a loud book, but it’s deeply resonant. And once you find its frequency, you don’t forget it.
What stays with me isn’t just the story of a couple disturbed by the arrival of a stranger. It’s the emotional geometry — how two people trying to protect something sacred can slowly watch it unravel under their own gaze. It’s how silence, repetition, and fear become more powerful than words.
Jon Fosse writes like no one else. His voice is quiet, but his ideas echo. He understands something crucial about human connection — that presence is not always intimacy, and solitude is not always peace. He shows how quickly desire can shift into dread, and how love can wither not from betrayal, but from doubt.
I keep thinking about the final pages. Not because of what happens, but because of what doesn’t. The ambiguity, the unease, the tension that never fully resolves — it lingers. And I think that’s what makes Fosse’s work so powerful. He doesn’t offer closure. He offers recognition.
And that, to me, is enough to return. To wait. To read again — slowly. Because Someone Is Going to Come is not a book you finish. It’s a book you live inside, long after it ends.
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