ays call her because of her extremely white face, but her face was unrecognizably destroyed when she was thrown through a window by a bomb blast. The soldier returns to his room and tries unsuccessfully to imagine Anna’s face being anything else but beautiful, even with scars. He thinks about his past romances and remembers them as complete disappointments. As he is standing in the hallway, when he finally gets the courage to open the door to Anna’s room, he “knew Anna was mine,” but when he sees her, he is greatly disappointed with what he sees. This theme of disappointment comes up frequently in many others of Boll’s stories. In “The Balek Scales”, the entire town is thrown into the realization that placing their trust in the Balek’s was a big mistake. Everyone is disappointed that the Balek’s weren’t trading honestly. It is a further disappointment that no one ever thought to question their authority over the possession and use of weights and measures and their dispersion of “justice”. The greatest disappointment, however, was calculating and figuring out how much money the Balek’s had cheated the entire community and surrounding communities of. The consequences of these collective disappointments befell, not on the source, the Balek’s, but on the narrator’s grandfather’s family, because he was the one who exposed the Baleks’ fraud. Another of Boll’s works that the presence of disappointment appears in is “Black Sheep.” The entire family of the narrator is disappointed in Uncle Otto. They are disappointed in him because they think that he has wasted his life doing nothing. He is such an intelligent and knowledgeable person, but refuses to obtain a job and instead asks everyone he knows for loans. This disappointment soon follows to the narrator because he starts to become exactly like Uncle Otto. After...
