The Narrator Helps a Drunk Man and Misses the German Abitur Exam

The Narrator Helps a Drunk Man and Misses the German Abitur Exam is a roadside emergency that pulls the narrator away from his final German examination and leaves him confronting a man’s death at close range. The delay costs him the exam: he arrives two hours late, cannot finish the essay, and later tells Frieder that he has failed. The episode’s force lies in the collision of two kinds of urgency—an unresponsive stranger in a ditch and the scheduled examination—while its aftermath makes death newly concrete without furnishing an answer to Frieder’s questions about suicide.

The roadside emergency

The narrator is cycling to the examination with Cäcilia and Frieder, who have gone ahead and left him behind. The roads between villages have been widened until pedestrians can no longer safely walk on them; anyone on foot has to use the ditch, while cars speed past. The older man approaching there moves slowly and unsteadily. When the narrator greets him, he suddenly tips sideways and falls headfirst into the ditch, as if struck.

The narrator throws his bicycle into a field and runs to help. He has taken a first-aid course with the Catholic youth group, but remembers little beyond mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and chest massage. The man lies face-down and does not move. Unsure whether moving him might worsen a possible spinal injury, the narrator waves at passing cars. Some drivers honk but do not stop. When he returns to the man, the older man has shifted onto his side; the narrator calls to him and sees that his chest is rising and falling.

A black BMW pulls up with its hazard lights on. Its driver, a broad-shouldered man with a closely cropped haircut, immediately takes charge: he tells the narrator to stop a car and ask for an emergency doctor, turns the older man onto his side, and calls him drunk. The narrator suspects that the driver has another reason for stopping besides the risk of being charged with failing to render assistance, though he cannot say what that reason is. The driver makes the practical obligation explicit, saying that they cannot leave the man there. When another motorist stops, he describes the man as helpless and again asks for an emergency doctor.

Waiting and death

The driver says that they will stay until the emergency doctor arrives. His choice of “we,” rather than “I,” makes the assurance an instruction that includes the narrator: helping becomes something the narrator is expected to continue doing. The narrator resists that imposed role, asking instead whether the driver knows the time. The promised doctor never comes. The older man sits upright for a while, shoos away flies, and shouts for them to go away. Then he abruptly falls backward and stops moving.

The driver checks the man’s neck and becomes urgent. He orders the narrator to open the car’s rear door and pulls the older man out of the ditch and into the vehicle. At the emergency department, two paramedics run out to meet them. They check the man’s neck and chest with fast, precise movements, then slow down. They place him on a stretcher, cover him up to the forehead, and wheel him into the building. The scene’s change of pace—from hurried rescue to the paramedics’ unhurried handling of the covered body—confirms the death through action rather than explanation.

The driver says that he will go inside to give his personal details, then comes back out and drives the narrator to his bicycle, which he says is on the way. Before they part, he asks whether the narrator has ever seen a dead person. The narrator has, but answers no; he says that this death does not seem so terrible to him, partly because he did not know the man beforehand. His response records a limited, immediate perception rather than a settled judgment about death. The emergency ends not in an account of who the man was, but in the driver’s question and the narrator’s uneasy evasion.

The examination and its cost

The narrator reaches the German Abitur two hours late. Doktor Turnschuh says nothing, and the other students remain bent over their papers; Frieder is the exception, silently raising his eyebrows and opening his mouth in surprise. The exam sheet offers Büchner, Goethe, or a textual argument. The narrator tries three times to read the assigned passage and cannot reach its end. It compares a novel to a flight simulator, a constructed cockpit in which pilots practise flying, taking off, and landing: literature, the passage proposes, simulates real flight.

The narrator tries to produce the required “clever” essay by polishing his language. He substitutes more formal words for colloquial ones, changing “Klos” to “Toiletten” and “Scheiße” to “Fäkalien,” and turns “total bescheuert” into “relativ fragwürdig.” Some of what he writes about tanks may not even be true; at the time, it simply sounds convincing to him. The substitutions reveal the gap between surface fluency and comprehension: he can make his prose sound more elevated, but cannot get to the end of the passage or secure a coherent argument. At the bicycle racks, Frieder asks how the essay went. The narrator answers that he has botched it and describes the man’s collapse and death, including the reversal that the stranger seemed dead at first, was still alive, and then died after all.

Frieder, suicide, and unresolved meaning

The roadside death resonates with the group’s earlier attempts to understand Frieder’s suicidal thinking, but the episode does not supply a single explanation for either his past attempt or his eventual death. Frieder has distinguished wanting to die by suicide from no longer wanting to live: he says he did not want to kill himself, only no longer to live, and believes those are different things. The distinction makes room for despair that cannot be reduced to a clear, stable intention, even as the people around him struggle to know what he might do.

That uncertainty is especially sharp when Frieder returns to the house after the incident with the older man. Everyone watches him, including Harry, who is still lying on the kitchen floor; the narrator cannot tell whether Frieder is about to announce that he will never try to die again or that he intends to die that day. Frieder has previously said that an unexplained good mood in someone who has long thought about suicide may mean that the person has made a decision. His exhausted grin while the others hurry for the bus therefore offers no reliable reassurance. The narrator remembers the empty place beside him in class and the image of Frieder hanging from a rope in the hayloft, while also recalling that Frieder recoils from the imagined end of being struck by a train.

When the narrator asks whether he should rescue Frieder if he suddenly fell through ice, Frieder says that he may rescue him: Frieder wants to choose for himself. He also suggests that someone who imagines how life would go on without him believes that his presence matters and will not act. These statements leave the boundary between a wish to die and a wish to be saved unsettled. Later, after the narrator learns that Frieder had deliberately provoked a police officer to shoot him, he beats Frieder, furious that Frieder had drawn the others into mortal danger. After Frieder’s eventual suicide, the narrator still cannot determine whether the reasons were the same as those behind the earlier attempt; as he thinks about the past, the question itself gradually fades without an answer.

Narrative significance

The episode binds together helping, obligation, and the limits of interpretation. The narrator acts when the older man falls, despite his incomplete first-aid knowledge and the examination ahead. The BMW driver’s command that “we” stay makes assistance communal, but the narrator’s questions and suspicions show that he experiences this duty as something imposed as well as chosen. Their actions do not prevent the man’s death, and the emergency doctor never arrives; nevertheless, the narrator remains with the stranger until the paramedics take him inside.

The examination’s flight-simulator passage forms an uneasy counterpoint to the roadside scene. In the exam, literature is described as a simulation of an experience; outside it, the narrator has encountered a death he cannot turn into an orderly essay. His report to Frieder is halting and concrete, while the examination demands abstract argument and verbal control. The contrast does not make the stranger’s death an answer to Frieder’s fate. Instead, the episode shows the narrator caught between experience and explanation: he can describe what happened, but neither his polished exam language nor his later talk with Frieder can make death fully legible.

That limit persists in the novel’s later reflection on Frieder. The narrator cannot establish whether the first attempt and the successful suicide had the same cause. He is left with an asymmetry of choice: not killing himself today leaves tomorrow open, whereas death closes off every later alternative. The roadside encounter anticipates that distinction in physical form—the time for help, the man’s collapse, the paramedics’ final covering—but refuses to turn it into a neat lesson. Its consequence is at once practical and interpretive: the narrator misses his German Abitur, and he carries away a death whose circumstances he witnessed but whose meaning he cannot settle.