Chapter 4

     This chapter is quite a confusing one.  I believe that Oskar is the narrator but I cannot be sure.  This chapter seems to be a collection of letters with Oskar's comments and plot points in between but there are not distinctions between the end of the letters and the beginning of the comments and plot points.  It seems as though this is deliberate but I cannot be sure. 
     One of the things I managed to pick up from the chapter was that Oskar seems to be asking different people to write him letters to he can compare their handwriting against the handwriting of the name "Black" written on the small envelope found in the chapter before.  He seems to have a letter from the following people:

- His Grandmother
- A woman whose letter is partly censored out
- A man from a Turkish Labor Camp
- Someone who signed the letter, "your father" but it doesn't seem to be referring to Oskar as the son
- An inmate named Kurt Schluter
- A schoolmate named Mary
- And at the end of the letter excerpts he says that he has a letter form everyone that he knew...a total of 100 letters

     Then the chapter seems to launch into a story from the past about a girl who had a crush on her older sister's boyfriend.  Then the story flashes forward to when they are grown up and in a different country (the USA, originally from Germany) and the girl, now a woman, sees the same boy across the street and goes up to him.  They have coffee and proceed to have him, an artist, draw her naked.  The story evolves to tell us that the woman is the girl and the man is the old boyfriend of the girl's sister.  The way the drawings unfold suggests that he is trying to draw his old girlfriend from the body of the sister he now knows.  However, as the story continues, the drawings start to look more like the sister in the room and less like his old girlfriend.  And therefore, this becomes a story of how they fell in love. 
     The story finishes with them in a coffee shop, where she writes down on a piece of paper, "Marry me" and he opens his palm to say, "Yes".  This connects two story lines - the one with the narrator from chapter two and this current story.  The chapter ends with it hinting that this story may be of Oskar's grandmother and grandfather.  However, I will not know for sure until later in the book.
     Overall, a very complex and confusing chapter, hopefully following chapters will share some light on the meanings of the different letters and how it is all connected.  If you, as the reader of this blog, have any ideas about what this chapter may mean, feel free to comment below.

Olivia