“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all of the lives I’m not living” (113).
The quote above shows how all of the characters in the book have the feeling of loss. The grandfather, after losing his ability of speech, is constantly rambling on about how he is feeling and what is going on around him since he cannot fully express how he is feeling. He sees pain and loss and despair all around him in everyday life, which becomes locked inside of him, causing a weight of the world to be on his shoulders. The grandfather’s life experiences have been so traumatic from losing Anna and his un-born child, to losing his speech, finally to losing the son he never knew, regrets and feelings of sorrow weigh him down.
The grandmother also had the traumatic experience of losing her family in the Dresden bombings, however, when she finds her sister’s first love it seems to give her a bit closer to all that she had lost in the past. When her husband leaves her, all she has to cling to is this un-born child that ends up dying on “The worst day.” She now has nothing left but Oskar, causing her to feel constant fear that he will be hurt, physically or emotionally.
Although the reader only meets Oskar’s father for a brief period of time, there are indicators that this feeling of complete loss has been brought into his generation. He refers to loss, not as physically losing a person, but by losing knowledge he was never able to put to good use in his life. He refers to himself as just a jeweler but then corrects the New York Times as if it is his job, showing he has lost the ability to try and use his smarts for the outside world. As an effort to prevent this from happening to Oskar he sends him on wild chases that force Oskar to think on a whole other intellectual level and question all that is out in the world.
Oskar, a very bright young boy, cannot handle emotion of pain any better then his grandparents. He expresses the emotion he cannot tell anyone about by giving himself bruises. Whenever he feels upset or angry he takes out the pain on himself. Also, he has a folder that he titles “Stuff that’s happened to me.” In this folder there are pictures of different actions including a shark attacking a girl, and a soldier getting his head cut off in Iraq. Obviously, these things have never happened to Oskar personally, but because he has felt such loss he feels as if the loss of the world is on his shoulders. From the quote above, one can take that this feeling of carrying the worlds problems is being passed down through the family.
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2 comments:
Good job explaining each character's loss. It's organized, which I like. You may want to elaborate further, though, and explain what all this loss has to do with why the grandfather chose to say this quote.
I feel like the quote has to do with not only losses, but regrets. Everyone has tragedies in their lifetime, but usually they come to grips with it. Why does the grandfather hear the strain of his bones? It's kind of a self-pitying quote. Like he's too good for his own life. Like he let one misfortune ruin any happiness he could have ever had. No one's life is perfect; why does he want so desperately to be living another life that it interferes with living the one he's actually got?
Well, I disagree with your statement that everyone has tragedies in their lifetime, but usually learn to deal because I feel that no one is ever able to simply forget about a horrible thing that has happened in thier past. Something extremely horrible, such as the bombings in the book, would carry on throughout their life because it had such an impact.
However, I do agree with the fact that the grandfather wants to be living a better life which I believe is something that everyone does at some point or another. If you look at celebrities that seem to have everything a minimum-wage worker would want, they seem to want normalities in life. I have never found anyone in this world that is completly happy with thier life and would not change anything if they had the chance.
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