One need not read much of Ibsen's play before one senses the hidden and repressed relationships between the characters, which will disintegrate at the tragic end of the work. As he nearly always does, Ibsen constructs an intrigue where he places clues throughout the course of events that one can see, in retrospect, serve as warnings of what would occur.
 
Carlsen's pictures do not function as explicit interpretations of scenes from Ibsen, and relating them to the text becomes more a question of observing how he gives his imagination free rein around certain elements of the story. Carlsen thus places himself within the modernistic tradition of illustration, which in a greater degree than earlier perceives the images as autonomous interpretations theat form their own independent world - a world that is only loosely connected to the text.