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He tends them obsessively, even brooding like a bird himself, until the housemaid Adela sweeps through the attic with a broom and throws open the windows, scattering the whole aviary in minutes. The episode shows an elaborate private imaginative world being undone by a single act of domestic practicality, leaving the father a deposed and diminished figure.
In the 'Treatise on Tailors' Dummies', the father lectures that matter is infinitely fertile, pliant, and eager to take on any form, so creation is not reserved for God. Humans may attempt a 'second generation' of beings made from shoddy, cheap materials, each meant to last a moment and perform a single gesture or role. He argues that the loftiness of the divine work does not matter, because the value lies in the act of animating matter, not in durability or perfection.
The father claims that forms imposed on matter are prisons. Tailors' dummies, wax figures, and furniture are all pieces of matter locked into shapes and meanings they did not choose, and they silently suffer. On this view every manufactured object carries a latent, frustrated life, and treating things as inert is a kind of cruelty born of inattention.
The Street of Crocodiles is the district of the town that has taken up cheap metropolitan commerce. Schulz depicts it as a pseudo-reality in which the shops, trams, crowds, and seductions only imitate a city and are made of material 'as thin as paper'. Its defining feature is that nothing there ever reaches completion: every transaction and desire stalls halfway, so the district's promise of modern excitement is always a hollow anticipation.
The book turns a provincial merchant household into cosmic myth by recording perception at a child's intensity. Wallpaper sprouts faces, seasons ferment and spoil, and a father's decline appears as literal metamorphosis into bird or cockroach. The mechanism is to refuse the adult distinction between the literal and the figurative, so that emotional truths such as a parent withdrawing or a town decaying are rendered as physical transformations of the world itself.