The hospital chair, colored red by the little girl in the cancer ward, acts as a symbol of life, creativity, and vitality. The narrator introduces the girl and chair one after the other, creating an implicit link between the two: “She was five. I met her a week ago. There was a small red chair in the hospital TV room, it was hers. It wasn’t red when she arrived, but she could see that it wanted to be” (3). The narrator’s personification of the chair reinforces the vitality of the girl despite her terminal diagnosis—she imbues even inanimate objects around her with life. Later, the girl lets her stuffed rabbit sit on the chair when it feels scared, positioning the chair as a source of comfort and hope in difficult circumstances.

In the narrator’s final moments, Backman uses the color red as a subtle reference to the chair’s symbolism. As they prepare to jump inward, the woman in the gray sweater hands the narrator “a pair of knitted gloves. They were grey, but there was a single thin red thread hanging from one of them. She pulled a small pair of scissors from one of her pockets and carefully cut it away” (63). The single red thread evokes the vitality of the girl and her red chair. The cutting of the thread becomes a quiet, deliberate ritual that signifies the finality of his decision and the transfer of life from the narrator to her, presenting Sacrifice as the Ultimate Act of Redemption.