It’s Just an Empty Box

“As you know, I’m extremely brave, but I can’t spend eternity in a small underground place.”(p.169)

Oskar voices many complex emotions and thoughts through the veil of childish, pretentious naivete in ELIC.  I find myself feeling a connection with him as I imagine I acted in much the same way, trying to armor myself with the bravado of perceived scholastic brilliance and superiority.  Children who experience traumatic events that they haven’t learned coping mechanisms for seem to react in one of two ways: they shut the world out by sulking and submerging themselves in independent activities like video games, or they make a show of being in the center of things and not caring about anyone else.  Oskar seems to try vert hard at doing the second, even so far as he constantly claims his mother doesn’t love him anymore and wishes he had died instead of his father.  For me the traumatic event that I reacted to for much of my childhood was the divorce of my parents.  One day I had a dad, and the next I didn’t, and now I can’t even remember what that must have felt like for young me.  But looking back I can see that more than anything else as a little boy I wanted a father, or maybe just a complete family.

For Oskar the idea that he should attach a memory of his father and meaning for his father to an empty box in the cemetery is ludicrous.  He believes that his father was cells which are now spread around the city, becoming part of the rest of the world.  This is verbal evidence of the shell he is attempting to project around himself to escape the pain and confusion of losing his father.  He blames his mother for his pain too because she wasn’t there to comfort him when his father died and he had to get home from school.  In my parallel story as a child I never really thought about blaming my mom exclusively, I blamed both of my parents equally, but looking back I can see times when I just wished she would find a new dad for me to fill the empty box in my life.  Oskar seems to show sometimes too that he cannot understand how his mom can miss his dad if she is still able to laugh.  What he has not learned yet for all his youthful smarts is that the indomitable nature of the human spirit in such cases as the extreme agony of losing a loved one so suddenly and violently is the true test of one’s character.  If we choose to crawl inside ourselves and cower until we die of dehydration from crying day after day, then the person we have lost has truly died.  For there is no evidence that we truly live on after death as Oskar says, and it is only through the memories of the living that the dead and disappeared live on.

So when Oskar dies he doesn’t want to be underground in that claustrophobic darkness of decay and anonymity, instead he and I would both like a place with a little elbow room, and some electric fencing to keep away the grave robbers.  Oh and some jewels.

1 comment

  1. I like this focus on the “empty box” that preoccupies Oskar’s mind. He seems so attached to his father, and resistant to possibility of other father-figures (like Ron). I wonder then, why he takes almost immediately to Mr. Black and “the renter”?

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