The context of the work is set between 1939 and 1944, in Danzig (Germany). But the narrator, Pilenz, tells the story about Mahlke and their adolescence, some years later, when he is already an adult. Pilenz's aim of writing this story is making a kind of catharsis in order to remove a feeling of guilt. This feeling of guilt is mainly due to the fact that, his high school fellow, Mahlke, died drowned into the sea at the end of the Second World War.

Along the novel the symbolic figures of the cat and the mouse, are named constantly. The cat mainly represents the persecutor, the repressor, while the mouse represents the victim. The cat in the novel represents, for instance, the Nazis and the mouse the occupied and humiliated Poland. Pilenz and Mahlke also represent both animals: Pilenz the cat as direct or indirectly contributes to Mahlke's destruction, and...