Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen
Published 2009 · 170 pages · 25,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Drama, Literary Fiction
How hard is Ghosts to read?
Ghosts scores 44 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 28 out of 100
- Ibsen writes plain, speakable dialogue in a drawing-room register, with few rare words. Compared with the Gatsby-level elegance of fiction, it is direct, and translation keeps it so.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Characters speak in short, conversational exchanges with occasional longer speeches by Mrs. Alving and Manders. Nothing approaches nested prose syntax.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Ideas about duty, joy of life and inherited sin are argued through concrete domestic events. The disease, the orphanage and the maid ground the debate, though the title ghost metaphor carries abstract weight.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- A compact three-act play with five characters and one setting. Revelations arrive in steady order, with little digression.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- Characters hint at the disease and the past, and the audience pieces together Captain Alving's life from half-sentences. Much is said directly by Act 2, though, unlike the withheld inference of Pedro Paramo.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The ghosts, the rain, the orphanage fire and the sun carry clear meaning. They are signposted and sparse, closer to the signposted symbolism of 1984 than to Moby-Dick.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Ibsen undercuts Manders' piety and the town's respect for Captain Alving, with dramatic irony in the orphanage's dedication. The play itself remains earnest.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The final moments leave Osvald's fate and Mrs. Alving's decision unresolved on stage, ending abruptly on a question. The central secrets, however, are fully revealed.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Three acts, one location and a nearly continuous timeframe. The only complexity is the gradual unveiling of the past through dialogue.
How Ghosts is regarded
Ghosts holds a literary regard score of 87 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.