82 pages • 2 hours read
John BoyneThe Boy at The Top of the Mountain
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
Uniforms and Identity
Throughout The Boy at the Top of the Mountain, uniforms represent questions of identity and belonging. This is a natural choice, given that clothing can express personality, and uniforms symbolize group identity. Uniforms are particularly important to Pierrot, since they are an obvious sign of belonging to a group. He desperately wants acceptance from others.
At Berghof, surrounded by Hitler’s soldiers and henchmen, Pierrot is bombarded by the sight of uniforms. He sees soldiers wearing some like “[a] pair of living statues,” and is envious of Ernst’s chauffeur suit (84). Reflecting on these, he realizes that he had always been enamored of uniforms and was always very curious about his father’s that hung in his closet back in Paris. Thus, when Hitler gives Pierrot the uniform of the Hitlerjugend, Pierrot is deeply honored. Nevertheless, the gift is not all wonderful; it fills him “with a mixture of anxiety and desire” as he recalls the youths on the train journey to Germany who had bullied him were wearing versions of this uniform (140). The fact that Pierrot decides in this moment to accept the uniform, despite knowing its violent implications, signals the transformation of his personality while also pointing back to his search for identity and acceptance: “those boys [on the train] had been afraid of nothing and were part of a gang. […] And he also liked the idea of belonging to something” (141).
At the same time, Pierrot hears clear warnings from others about what uniforms can signify, in addition to feeling his own reservations about them. En route to purchase new clothes just after he arrives at Berghof, Pierrot listens as Ernst jokes that “[e]very girl likes a man in uniform,” while Beatrix retorts “[e]very girl, perhaps, […b]ut not every uniform” (93). This begins the first of several conversations they will have with Pierrot about the ominousness of Nazi rule, with Ernst warning him that people tend to like uniforms “because a person who wears one believes he can do anything he likes” (93). Though Pierrot largely ignores this perspective for much of the novel, it introduces the idea that outward appearances are meaningless and that what counts is inner substance. When soldiers mock Pierrot for having a uniform but no real role (“[h]e just likes to play dress up”) as life at Berghof crumbles at the end of the war, it signals that he will begin to learn this lesson in humility in the years after the war (240).
Food and Cruelty
Food is traditionally connected to home, comfort, and togetherness. Yet given Pierrot’s struggles with identity and desire to belong throughout the novel, the traditional symbolism with food is inverted. Cruelty, abuse, and violence are all strongly connected to food throughout The Boy at the Top of the Mountain.
One early example is when a group of Hitlerjugend steal the sandwiches Adèle had prepared for Pierrot. Kotler, the leader of the group, mocks the hungry Pierrot, saying, “I could have given one to you. You look as if you’re starving!” (69). He is crushed by Kotler’s cruelty, yet feels defenseless. The episode had a lasting influence on Pierrot’s sensibility, but instead of being inspired to treat others with kindness, he later ends up replicating the cruelty of the Hitlerjugend. After he has become entrenched in Nazi ideology and a member of the group himself, he berates Emma for hurting his pride and demands, “You’re the cook […a]nd I am a hungry Scharführer. You will make me a sandwich,” before flinging her to the ground (202).
Ironically, the plot to poison Hitler described in the novel is also related to food. In this case, instead of a cruel person exercising power over others in connection to food, the plot involves using food in an attempt to take out the novel’s epicenter of cruelty, Hitler. Ernst and Beatrix arrange to inject poison into a traditional Christmas cake, or stollen. Emma made the cake “into the shape of the Berghof itself, with icing sugar sprinkled liberally over the top to represent the snow” (182). While the plot fails, the symbolism is clear: they intend for Hitler to eat a portrait of his own cruelty at the epicenter of the Nazi world, Berghof.
Spaces of Home
Motifs of home connect to Pierrot’s search for identity and belonging throughout The Boy at the Top of the Mountain. For much of the novel, a stable, fulfilling home eludes Pierrot. His early years in Paris were relatively happy, despite the conflicts between his parents. In particular, the time spent together in Anshel’s room creating stories, with Pierrot “on a chair opposite his friend,” comprises a space of belonging and joy (5). This world is taken from him after the deaths of his parents, and the surrogate home provided by the orphanage does not replace it.
Pierrot’s struggles to define home are in some cases geographic in nature. Born into a French-German family, he is frequently unsure of whether to side with one nation, or the other, or to navigate some identity between the two. Displaced in Austria at Berghof, high up on the mountain and removed even from the village of Berchtesgaden, he again questions whether or not he belongs, asking himself “[w]hy am I on a mountain?” and “[w]hat sort of place is this?” (83). As time goes on, Pierrot finds spaces where he feels more comfortable at Berghof, beginning with the mansion’s library—a space that is significant both because of its connection to the interest in literature that he and Anshel share and because it is the first place he meets Hitler.
As Pierrot becomes closer to Hitler and more entrenched in his ideology, he becomes more confident in commanding the spaces of Berghof. This includes ordering the house staff around, such as going to the kitchen and demanding Emma make him a sandwich. More tellingly, Hitler eventually orders Beatrix to give her larger room to Pierrot; while he “wanted the bigger room, of course” he “also wanted her to recognize that it was his right to have it” (168). This command of the mansion’s spaces is short-lived and not a substitute for a real sense of home, however. When the American soldiers storm Berghof, Pierrot is reduced to hiding in a broom closet.
His experience in the cramp Golden Mile camp echoes the close quarters of the orphanage dormitories, but more importantly, are a small way that Pierrot pays penance for his wrongdoings. Once Pierrot and Anshel reunite at the close of the novel, their reconciliation is symbolically noted in the way that they fill the space of Anshel’s Paris apartment; as Pierrot prepares to tell his story, “[h]e sat down opposite [Anshel],” exactly the same position as in their childhood (258). This subtle detail signals a return to home, a resolution of the final chapter’s title, “A Boy without a Home,” which itself is a kind of antithesis of the novel’s title, The Boy at the Top of the Mountain.
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