Oskar's Unreliability Continued

  Oskar's Unreliability Continued               

             While reading the second half of the novel, I couldn’t help but think about the question that we brought up in class last week: is the narrator reliable?  After almost completing this half of the novel, I am inclined to believe that no, Oskar is not a reliable narrator in the slightest because there is something mentally wrong with him.  We, of course, have this suspicion from the start of the novel when we learn that Oskar is in a mental hospital.  However, the action that really confirmed his mental instability to me is his obsession with the nurse who lives next to him, Sister Dorothea.

                Oskar is unnaturally obsessed with Sister Dorothea even though they have never met.  Again, this does not come as a surprise because Oskar has always displayed deep affection for nurses.  Sister Dorothea seems to be different from the other nurses, however, because instead of simply feeling affection, Oskar is obsessed.  For instance, when Oskar goes through her mail, he notices that Dr. Werner sends Sister Dorothea letters on a regular basis.  Before he even opens a letter and looks at its contents, Oskar is deeply jealous of Dr. Werner.  He decides, “…to study medicine and graduate as quickly as possible.  I would become a doctor…. I would drive Dr. Werner out, expose him, reveal his incompetence” (464).  This hinted of Oskar’s mental instability for a few reasons.  First, he knows nothing of Dr. Werner’s intelligence and creates this story of him botching a larynx operation just because he is jealous of his attention toward Sister Dorothea.  Second, Oskar makes such a rash and unattainable decision to become a doctor when he has shown no interest in medicine before.  Lastly, I found this to point to Oskar’s unstable mental state because he has never met Sister Dorothea and has no reason for such a deep obsession.   Another action that illustrates Oskar’s obsession with Sister Dorothea is when he steals her hair and refers to it as a trophy.

                The last action that I believe illustrates Oskar as an unreliable narrator is when he finds the leather belt in the back of Sister Dorothea’s closet.  He is immediately brought into a flashback of the horse’s head on the shore when he was a boy with Jan, his mother, and Matzerath because the feel of the belt makes him think of eels.  He not only relives this scene, but also how his mother was never the same after that and ate fish until she died.  He gets lost in these dark thoughts until he, “repeatedly banished to the harbor jetty, gradually managed, with the help of the seagulls, to find his way back to the world of Sister Dorothea, at least to that half of the wardrobe that sheltered her empty but still alluring uniforms” (475).  This made me believe Oskar was unreliable not because he was reliving such bad memories, but because he could not be transported back to the present until he saw the nurses uniforms.  This again points to Oskar’s obsession with not only Sister Dorothea, but nurses in general.

                From this moment on, it was confirmed for me that the narrator was not reliable. Someone who has such a deep obsession for a person they do not know, and takes such personal actions (like stealing her hair) is someone that is untrustworthy.  While I am not positive of why Oskar is mentally unstable, I think it has to do with the traumas of his past and his unstable family life.