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Summary: Chapter 15

The day after Oskar digs up his dad’s grave, he returns to Mr. Black’s apartment. Inside, he finds a realtor preparing to sell it. She doesn’t know where Mr. Black is. Oskar tells her he left something in the apartment he needs to get and shoves past her. He walks to the index of biographies and takes out Mr. Black’s card. When he looks through the S’s, he finds an entry for Schell and thinks he’s succeeded in making his dad into a great man. Upon closer examination, the card reads “Oskar Schell: Son.” 

Oskar wishes he’d known the last time he saw Mr. Black was going to be the last time, just as he wishes that he’d known the last time his dad tucked him in was the last. He hopes Mr. Black is on the observation deck of the Empire State Building but never checks for sure.

Oskar keeps looking for the lock half-heartedly. The last person named Black he meets is Peter Black, who lets him hold his baby. Oskar exclaims how fragile the baby seems, and Peter agrees but says that his family protects him.

When Oskar gets home, he notices the kitchen phone has an old message on it and decides to listen. It’s from Abby Black calling to say she might know something about the key after all. Oskar leaves to go to Abby’s place.

Abby appears to have been waiting for him even though she’d left the message eight months ago. She explains that she didn’t tell Oskar about the key at first because it involved her now ex-husband, William, and she had been mad at him at the time. Oskar tells her that she hurt him. She apologizes. Oskar accuses her of ruining his life. She offers to kiss Oskar, but Oskar asks for a hug instead. He asks why Abby’s message cut off half way through, and she explains that his mom answered the phone at that point. 

Oskar realizes that his mom has known about his quest for the key and the reason why people started to expect him was that she had called ahead of time. His mom had never asked where he was going because she knew. 

Oskar goes to William’s office. Before William’s father died, he wrote a letter to every single person he knew. William, who never got along with his father, couldn’t bring himself to read his letter until a few weeks after his father’s death. The letter revealed that William’s father had left him the key to a safety deposit box in a blue vase but no personal message. William had already sold all his father’s things, including the vase, at an estate sale. Oskar’s dad had bought the vase as a present for Oskar’s mom for their anniversary. William doesn’t remember very much about Oskar’s dad but says he seemed nice. 

William invites Oskar to come with him to open the safety deposit box, but Oskar declines. He tells William that on 9/11, when he got home, he saw his dad had already left messages. When the phone rang again, Oskar couldn’t bring himself to pick up the phone. Oskar blames himself for not being there for his dad when he needed him. Oskar asks for William’s forgiveness for not telling anyone. William forgives him.

Thomas waits for Oskar under the streetlamp when Oskar gets home. They meet every night to go over their plans to dig up Oskar’s dad’s grave. Oskar tells him that he found the lock and wishes he hadn’t because searching for it made him feel close to his dad. 

When Oskar gets home, he finds a letter from Stephen Hawking. Hawking tells Oskar that he has a wonderful imagination. He answers Oskar’s question “What if I never stop inventing?” by confessing that he wishes he were a poet. He explains that the majority of the universe is made of dark matter, meaning that most of the world depends on something we’ll never be able to sense. He wishes he made something life depended on. He asks Oskar if he’s truly inventing at all.

Analysis: Chapter 15

Oskar’s entry in Mr. Black’s biographical index celebrates the triumph of personal connections over fame and greatness, and helps him understand his place in the world. Unlike the majority of entries Mr. Black has in his index, he labels Oskar as important for being a son, suggesting both that he finds Oskar’s love of his father important and perhaps that he views Oskar as a son-type figure for himself. This distillation puts a son on the same level of importance as the other, more famous people in Mr. Black’s index. Furthermore, Mr. Black including Oskar, not his dad, echoes Georgia Black and her husband’s habit of valuing what they care about in the moment. Mr. Black celebrates Oskar’s significance now, not his father’s significance posthumously. Through this, Oskar needn’t doubt that he meant a lot to Mr. Black. In addition, throughout the novel, Oskar has struggled with his role in his family, trying to be a jester or protector. Mr. Black cuts through this confusion by labeling Oskar a son, emphasizing that he is still someone in need of protection, guidance, and care.

Oskar learns many secrets throughout this chapter, and in doing so, discovers that secrets, even protective secrets, are often damaging. Abby Black’s desire to punish William by keeping Oskar’s key a secret has the unintended consequence of hurting Oskar, recalling Thomas’s inability to just shoot the carnivores. Here, as in the rest of the novel, acts of anger and aggression have unintended victims and create more pain in the world. Oskar’s mom’s secret monitoring of Oskar’s quest has less clear consequences. On the one hand, by protecting Oskar from afar, she allows him to come to his own conclusions and protects him from feeling babied or pressured to include her in his grieving process. However, her actions have also had the effect of making Oskar believe that she didn’t care where he went, making him feel farther away from her. This secret has loving intentions but ultimately weakens Oskar’s mom’s relationship with her son. Just as Thomas not confronting Grandma about her blank pages simply kept them from having a conversation about their grief that they needed to have, Oskar’s mom’s secret monitoring keeps her from having an honest conversation with Oskar about how much and how unconditionally she loves him. 

Oskar’s quest for the lock ends with no answers about his dad, demonstrating the inevitability of ambiguity. Oskar cannot gain any answers about his dad from William, who never really knew Oskar’s dad and had a difficult relationship with his own father. Beyond the safety deposit key, William’s father didn’t offer him anything personal to remember him by, leaving William feeling forever alienated from his father. Although William will finally get to learn what his dad left him in the safety deposit box, he will never get what he actually wanted from his father in the form of loving, heartfelt communication. Therefore, the quest has led Oskar to another father-son relationship trapped in limbo. Oskar expresses his need for concrete answers by confessing to William his secret about the phone and his guilt and asking for forgiveness. Although, as an outsider, William cannot possibly give Oskar the forgiveness he seeks, because Oskar had hoped this quest would bring him answers, William, as the endpoint of his quest, becomes the closest Oskar can have to closure.

The letter from Stephen Hawking at the end of the chapter counterbalances Oskar’s disappointment by highlighting the importance of the ambiguity he must live with. Stephen Hawking represents Oskar’s love of science and the way physics categorizes, organizes, and explains the universe. Physics also has a deep tie to math, which often has concrete correct answers. However, Stephen Hawking expresses a desire to be a poet, which is tied to literature, the humanities, and ambiguity. Hawking even explicitly says that life depends on not knowing. This sentiment echoes the lessons Oskar’s dad taught him in the last Reconnaissance Expedition and the Sixth Borough fable about how not having a concrete answer can also lead to exploration and imagination. If, as Stephen Hawking suggests, so much of the universe depends on dark matter, something no one can see or understand, then inventing and imagining things about that unknown is not only an inevitable part of life but a necessary and beautiful one.


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