Oskar

"I could tell that she didn't really love me. I knew the truth, which was that if she could have chosen, it would have been my funeral we were driving to." (6)

Oskar appears bitter with his mother. He blames her of his sufferings and expects her to suffer the same way he does. Of course, understanding that each person suffers in their own way is an idea beyond his reach: he just wants evidence that she misses his father. This is why he gets angry when she listens to music a little bit louder than normal or simply laughs.

"GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU" (73)

Oskar is a very creative child, he comes up with thousands of ideas on things that are still to be invented, like this one: a device on an ambulance that would flash a message to the people around so that they should know whether they knew the person in the ambulance or not, and whether it was something major or not. If the person was a very loved one and he or she was in real danger, the device would flash the sentence above.

"Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are' 'And the more you wage war?" (99)

In his first exchange with Abby Black, Oskar explains to her what it takes to be a human being, what makes us different from the other animals. He chooses to focus on the nice part of it, on kissing with the lips, maybe because he has just asked her if they could kiss. However, she replies with something he did not expect: a human being may also be more human if they wage war.

"I told her, 'It's OK if you fall in love again". (324)

With this quote we can see how Oskar has changed at the end of the story. At first he is hurt to see his mother laughing, he feels it is a lack of respect for his father and he cannot conceive the idea of her falling in love again, he just cannot accept it. However, in the end, when everything makes sense, he is OK with her carrying on. Of course, he feels great relief when he comprehends that if his mom didn't ask him where he was going was simply because she already knew, not because she did not care about him. This is also one of the reasons why he starts seeing things differently.

"I ripped the page out of the book. I reversed the order, [...] And if I'd had more pictures, he would've flown through a window, back into the building [...] We would have been safe". (325-326)

The last sentences of the story are Oskar's thoughts on how if he could reverse things, everything would be alright. Nonetheless, he is aware that even if he had a lot of pictures of the man falling and could reverse the order nothing would change, for there is no way of altering the past. This is indeed a lesson that he, as well as his grandparents, have learnt: what has not been said, will remain unsaid.