Summary
The little girl strokes a fourth match against the wall. This time, the bright glow reveals to her the clear, shining image of her kindly and lovely grandmother.
The little girl calls out to her grandmother, imploring her to take the little girl with her. She says she knows her grandmother will disappear when the match burns out; she will vanish, just as the stove, goose, and Christmas tree did.
Wishing to keep her grandmother with her, the little girl strikes a bundle of matches, which glow brighter than daylight. In this light, her grandmother appears grander and more beautiful than the little girl has ever seen her.
The grandmother lifts the little girl into her arms. Ensconced in joy and brightness, the little girl and her grandmother fly into the sky, high above the Earth, to a place free of cold, hunger, and fear. They are with God.
The perspective shifts to show the little girl in the corner of the houses’ exterior walls, leaning with red cheeks and a smiling mouth.
The narrator reveals that the little girl has frozen to death. The New Year’s Day sun rises on the pathetic little figure. She sits stiff and cold, holding burnt matches still.
The story ends on the image of the frozen little girl and the ignorant passersby speculating incorrectly on the last moments of her life. The people who find her assume she wanted to warm herself with the matches. None of them imagine the beautiful visions the little girl saw. None of them imagine how happy she was when she went with her grandmother into the bright New Year.
Analysis
The fourth match brings a clear vision of the girl’s grandmother, the only person from whom she ever felt love. The girl asks if she can join her grandmother, meaning join her in the afterlife.
The beautiful, warm, joyful image of the grandmother contrasts against the story’s hitherto gloomy, freezing mood and the life of poverty and cruelty the little girl has endured.
Comforted by her grandmother’s warm embrace, the girl imagines that she is flying into the heavens to join her grandmother. In the afterlife, she accepts that she will leave the cold, hunger, and fear that have characterized her mortal reality. With God, she will be safe.
The girl’s hallucinatory experience of ascending to the heavens and leaving her earthly troubles behind is juxtaposed with a perspective shift. The narrator moves out of the little girl’s point of view by cutting to the morning, when the New Year’s sun rises on the girl’s frozen dead body. While the girl’s spirit left for the afterlife, her body remains for passersby to see smiling. The smile is symbolic of the hope and joy she felt at the end of her life, as she embraced death.
Despite her smile, people see the poor dead girl as a pathetic little figure. The matches she has burnt suggest to them she tried to keep warm. However, Andersen ends the story by returning to the theme of imagination through an instance of dramatic irony: these people cannot possibly imagine everything that went through the girl’s mind as she succumbed to hypothermia. While they might have had health and more money than her, they lack the imagination and optimism she showed at the end of her short, unfortunate life.
