The title, Cat and Mouse, can be taken as a metaphor of war, society, and victim or it can be a description of the relationship of our narrator (the observer) and Mahlke the performer. The boys spend their days swimming out to a sunken boat and sit on the ships bridge which rises a little above water and represents the destructiveness of war. The story is told by an unreliable, unnamed narrator, until the 8th chapter when we finally are given the name Pilenz. The story opens with the description of a cat pouncing on Mahlke's Adam apple. Mahlke is an awkward youth with an enormously large Adam's apple. The story is about The Great Mahlke as he is eventually labeled by his adolescent peer. I enjoyed this one so much more than the first book. This is the second book in the Danzig Trilogy but other than a couple of cameo appearance of the little drummer, it is not necessary to have read The Tin Drum first in my opinion.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |