Question 1: Evidence
Peekay shows he is humble when he is talking about his success in his schoolwork. He says that he could’ve bee ‘elevated even further, but the embarrassment it would’ve caused’. This shows that Peekay is thinking of others as well, so they wouldn’t feel bad about themselves. Also, he says that his reputation for being clever was unjust or unreasonable. This is quite impressive for a six-year-old boy in a foreign country. Peekay had been acting ‘dumb’ before Doc told him to ‘drop his camouflage’.
Question 2: Evidence
We find some evidence that Doc is an alcoholic in the early stages in chapter ten when we first get a description of his house. He has a ‘room for music, a book room, and a whiskey room’. The fact that Doc has a place to drink whiskey tells us that he has a bad drinking problem. This could be because he had a bad past life, either being in the previous world war and seeing masses of people dying or he may have married somebody and they had died.
Question 3: Metaphor
The metaphor ‘The wolves were howling in my head last night’ is probably referring to the previous hardships Doc had experienced whether war-related or not. This made Doc drink himself to sleep which caused him to get a hangover. In the morning when Peekay played his music, Doc asked him to play soft or (piano, pianissimo) instead of the usual loud (forte, fortissimo) music. Peekay grows up with this life and learns to play mostly soft music.
Question 4: Headline, NO SPY BUT STILL A GERMAN?
The significance of this headline is that Doc was convicted of being a spy only because he was German with no evidence. This was a very sad thing because Doc was a very innocent man with no intention of spying, at least for the moment. Peekay must’ve been sad after Doc was arrested because he was his only real friend. Peekay now suffers again.
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