The Two-Fold Aspect of Everything
Within the extremes of duality is found the world; the extremes range from the absurd to the terrifying and the novel seeks to inform that what is absurd can also be terrifying and what is terrifying can be absurd. Oskar is both a boy and a man; at once both, but never really just one separately. He is clearly quite lucid, but also—by his own admission in the opening lines—an inmate in an asylum. Facing across each other from the walls of his mother’s house are portraits of Beethoven and Hitler: extreme examples of the best of German culture and the worst of it, staring across the void between, finding “no joy in what they saw” there in the void, the abyss, the dark chasm and the thin line separating genius from madness. But which was genius and which was mad? That is the question which permeates throughout the novel and the answer is, of course, both. As is the world. As are we all to one degree or another.
The Unreliability of Narrative
Ultimately, the story that Oskar tells is one that is impossible to determine with a finite sense of accuracy what was true and what was false, much less what was partially true and mostly false and what was mostly true, but partially false. In keeping with the thematic exploration of duality and its two-fold aspect of everything, the novel is both complete fiction, but situated within the horrific realities of Germany’s darkest period. So, it is a narrative that is at once true and untrue and Oskar’s status among the great unreliable narrators in the history of fiction—from Gulliver through Huckleberry Finn in literature to the storytellers of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Usual Suspects in film—only serves to underscore the point that everything we know is really a narrative which has been told to us which is even at its best a commingling of fact and fiction, history and myth, legends and forgotten heroes.
Adults Are Really Pretty Terrible as a Whole
Well, this isn’t just a theme, but the entire premise of the novel. Oskar throws himself down the cellar steps to provide justification for the consequences of what is actually accomplished through his sheer force of will. He will grow up, but not grow up. His decision to reject adulthood in appearance even though his will is not forceful enough to retard the maturation process entirely is situated, appropriately enough, by Oskar within a metaphorical litany of imagery that reminds us of the two-fold aspect of everything:
“Little people and big people, Little Dipper and Big Dipper, little and big ABCs, Little Hans and Karl the Great, David and Goliath, Hop-o'-My-Thumb and the Giant; I remained the three-year-old, a gnome.”
Most readers will likely empathize with Oskar’s decision even if they may not go far as to approve; the adults which surround are truly a ghastly process of terrible people for the most part.
