In these closing chapters, the place from which characters feel most alienated is their homeland itself, emphasizing the motif of exile. While in the previous section, this sense of alienation seized Katia and Klaus, now Thomas embarks on the journey of feeling like a stranger in his homeland. Thomas and Katia visit Germany twice in the last three chapters, in the first instance for Thomas to deliver a lecture on Goethe. Tóibín uses visual imagery and figurative language to capture Thomas’s sense of despair when he visits Frankfurt: “The sky itself was a deadened, murky grey as though it too had been bombed and cleared of all its color” (400). The empty, sullen sky is a metaphor for Thomas’s sense of desolation; he knows that the Germany of his youth is irrevocably lost. In Munich, Katia can’t tell one bombed street from another. In an ultimate act of desecration, Katia’s parents’ beautiful house was converted to a Nazi building.

When Thomas visits Weimar, Goethe’s home city, he initially has some hope of being transformed by Goethe’s spirit. However, in Weimar, he realizes that because this is the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp, it has changed irrevocably. Though “Goethe had dreamed of many things, he had never imagined Buchenwald. No poems about love, or nature, or man, would ever rescue this place from the curse that had descended on it” (423). For Thomas, the loss of Weimar—the ancient name suggestive of high German culture—is complete.

However, his second visit to Germany, which ends the novel, has a different, more elegiac tone, which signifies Thomas coming to terms with the loss of his country. In Lübeck, Thomas is first flooded with disappointment, regretting his visit. He’s particularly scarred by the story of bombs going “[d]eep into the bowels of Lübeck, deep enough to smash open the grave of the composer Buxtehude” (431). The juxtaposition of the annihilatory bombs against music seems obscene to Thomas, as is evident in the image of bombs violating Lübeck’s “bowels.” However, when Thomas hears a young woman singing a cantata by Buxtehude, it reminds him that composers may die, and their graves may be desecrated, but music lives on. The coda of Julia’s story about Buxtehude infuses hope in Thomas’s exile. Even though he has lost Germany, he has simultaneously made Germany his own by writing about its beauty in his works.

Heightening the somber tone of this section is the depiction of Thomas losing Klaus and Heinrich. For Thomas, the death of his older son is the one inconsolable loss in his life. In a poignant passage, he observes that when Carla died, he “had his mother to console. When Lula died, he had his own family to be with. Now, despite the presence of Katia and Erika, he was alone. There was no one he could turn to” (394). Grief locks him and Katia in isolated chambers; the two don’t even want to speak to each other. In light of their sorrow, their refusal to attend Klaus’s funeral seems strange to Michael and Golo but reflects the complex nature of grief. The narrative shows how mourning takes different forms: Thomas and Katia choose to stay on his lecture tour because even acknowledging their son’s death is unbearable for the aging parents.

The other great loss in Thomas’s life in this section is Heinrich. After Heinrich’s death, Thomas reflects that “he would have only ghosts against whom to measure himself” (415). As in Klaus’s case, Thomas misses the opposition that Heinrich brought him, as apparent in the word “measure.” While these losses shake Thomas to the core, he finds solace in music, his writing, and his brief connections with men. The extent to which his fleeting encounters with men affect Thomas is evident in this description of parting from the server, Franzl:

He bowed and walked out of their secluded place as Thomas watched him in the dappled afternoon light. He would wait here for a while, he thought, knowing that the scene in which he had just taken part was something that might not, in his lifetime, come again (424).

The tone of this passage is steeped in longing, yet (echoing the pattern of tension that dominates Thomas’s life) the longing powers him and his writing. Significantly, Thomas recalls that while Erika considered his open admiration of Franzl inappropriate, Katia arranged for her husband to have a day alone with Franzl. Her gesture illustrates the depth of her friendship with Thomas and shows her liberal, open spirit. Conversely, Erika’s disapproval indicates how even the most radical children can be conservative regarding their parents. Ironically, Erika, who always spoke openly about her relationships with women, now tells Thomas that he must not make a public scene with a man. Nevertheless, Erika’s disapproval signifies her understanding of the implicit pressure Thomas faces to maintain the front of the respectable family man, thematically supporting The Complex Relationship Between Sexuality, Self, and Family.

Tóibín uses allusions throughout the novel to enrich the sociohistorical context and to illustrate the relationship between life and writing. Descriptions of Thomas’s works populate the novel, especially to depict how Thomas’s themes and plots germinate. These chapters inextricably link the development of Felix Krull: Confidence Man to Thomas’s growing boldness, his disenchantment with the US, and his loss of Heinrich and Klaus. Without Klaus and Heinrich, his foils, Thomas must become his own opposition. He must write and act in a way that is wholly his. Speaking out against the growing paranoia in the US may “[m]ake him feel morally worthy, but it was a pose as much as any of the others he had taken on in his life” (418). Therefore, he decides to shed the pose and make the more radical decision to leave the US. He’ll raise the issue of the self and the artist as a poser, a trickster, through the character of Felix Krull.

Thomas’s joy in Felix Krull’s duplicitous nature reflects the novel’s title. Like the con artist, the hustler, and the magician, the writer plays tricks on their audience, using the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief to work magic. In addition, the trickster is the perfect doppelganger for Thomas since a trickster is a master of reinvention. The ability to change and adapt, as well as to hide and be unpredictable, is for Thomas “[t]he pure genius of humanity, and all the pathos” (418).