"Money can't buy me love, obviously, but i asked if it would have Zildjian cymbals"(3) ---
On the very first page of the book, he talks about the teakettle singing the Yellow Submarine- The Beatles, in his fathers voice.
There is another reference to the Beatles on page 40:
"Dear Osk,
Hello,lad! Thanks for your glorious letter
and the bulletproof drumsticks, which I hope I'll
never have to use! I have to confess, I never
thought too much about giving lessons...
I hope you like the enclosed T-shirt,which I
took the liberty of signing for you.
Your mate,
Ringo "
Ringo was the Drum player for The Beatles, and Oskar must have wrote him.
"Dad always used to tuck me in and he'd tell the greatest stories, and we'd read the New York Times together and sometimes he'd whistle 'I am the Walrus,' because that was his favorite song, even though he couldn't explain what it meant, which frustrated me." (12) If you look up the lyrics to this song, they are completely random, much like Oskar's thoughts, and sometimes they go back to the original subject that he was thinking about, much like the song goes back to the chorus.
"And then for some reason I started thinking about 'Something in the Way She Moves,' so I asked, 'Is a love song a love song?' He said, 'Yes!' I thought for a second. 'Is love love?' He said, 'No!'" (pg. 156)
"I thought about "Eleanor Rigby." It's true, where do they all come from? And where do they all come from?" (163)
"We were on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing 'Hey Jude.' It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how." (pg. 207)
"I turned on the radio and found a station playing "Hey Jude." It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted take the sad song and make it better." (207)
Referring to this quote, Oskar is like his grandfather in a sense, in which he doesn't want to feel bad of his father and would like to come to some stage of normality. It being the same with Anna's death and the effect it had on Oskar's grandfather. Both are finding it very difficult to get to that point. "He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know how to live either, but I am trying. I do not know how to try."(181)
Reffering to the quote on page 207 about "Hey Jude," I think Jonathon Safron Foer put this in the book to show that even though Oskar rarely ever comes out about his feelings, usually using ambigious ways of explaining his emotions, he still can see what is wrong with his life and openly tells us that he wants to make it better again.
"I wish he could remember even more details, like if Dad had unbuttoned his shirt's top button, or if he smelled like shaving, or if he whistled "I Am the Walrus."(298)