Beartown

Beartown

by

Fredrik Backman

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Beartown makes teaching easy.

Robbie Holts Character Analysis

Robbie is an unemployed, alcoholic man in his 40s who was once believed to be a more promising hockey player than Peter Andersson. However, he advanced to the professional team too early and couldn’t handle the pressure mentally. He left hockey, started drinking, and got a job in the factory. Bitter about his failed career, he spends most of his days drinking in Ramona’s Bearskin pub. At the end of the book, however, Tails arranges for Robbie to get a job in the supermarket warehouse, and things begin looking up for him.

Robbie Holts Quotes in Beartown

The Beartown quotes below are all either spoken by Robbie Holts or refer to Robbie Holts. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Community Breakdown and Inequality Theme Icon
).
Chapter 18 Quotes

Robbie Holts is standing alone in the street, hating himself. […] It’s a peculiar sort of angst, the one he lives with, knowing that you had the greatest moment in your life at the age of seventeen. While he was growing up everyone kept telling him he was going to turn professional, and he believed them so intensely that when he didn’t make it, he took it to mean that everyone else had let him down, as if somehow it wasn’t his own fault. He wakes up in the mornings with the feeling that someone has stolen a better life from him, an unbearable phantom pain between what he should have been and what he actually became. Bitterness can be corrosive; it can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.

Related Characters: Robbie Holts
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Beartown LitChart as a printable PDF.
Beartown PDF

Robbie Holts Quotes in Beartown

The Beartown quotes below are all either spoken by Robbie Holts or refer to Robbie Holts. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Community Breakdown and Inequality Theme Icon
).
Chapter 18 Quotes

Robbie Holts is standing alone in the street, hating himself. […] It’s a peculiar sort of angst, the one he lives with, knowing that you had the greatest moment in your life at the age of seventeen. While he was growing up everyone kept telling him he was going to turn professional, and he believed them so intensely that when he didn’t make it, he took it to mean that everyone else had let him down, as if somehow it wasn’t his own fault. He wakes up in the mornings with the feeling that someone has stolen a better life from him, an unbearable phantom pain between what he should have been and what he actually became. Bitterness can be corrosive; it can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.

Related Characters: Robbie Holts
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis: