This post is about the novel The Tin Drum by Nobel prize winning novelist Gunter Grass. I have read only one of his novels but have preserved a very strong impression of the novel’s style and narrative structure. The Tin Drum is the life of Oskar Matzerath. Oskar Matzerath’s companion through life is his drum which has seen the events of his life unfold since his third birthday; the day Oskar gets the most prized possession of his life and the day he decided he was not going to grow. Oskar’s life falls between Goethe and Rasputin, one a poet-prime who engages in a game of artifice with the devil, the other a scheming courtier, notorious for his uxoriousness and bewitching hyper sexuality. There is no love in Oskar’s life. In-fact Oscar is the cause of death or the harbinger of death. It is this truth which he confesses to Bebra. He causes his mother’s death. He is the cause of Bronski’s death in the Polish post office; he is the cause of Roswitha Raguna’s death and also the cause of Alfred Matzerath’s death. Yet Oskar is neither cruel nor vicious. Oskar seems to revel in the enormous uncertainty of the present.
The novel hides a painful tragedy behind a note of grudging sarcasm. Oskar’s stunted stature is symbolic. His physical stature is misleading. The Tin Drum is an expression of anger and bewilderment suppressed by a note of callousness. Oskar is like Yossarian in Catch 22. He is an unreliable narrator whose words cannot be considered totally true or totally untrue. The Post-modern element in the novel, exposes the nature of experience and truth. Oskar’s Tin Drum speaks for him. It defies convention, tradition, authority and power. It is Oskar’ s tool to manipulate and scorn the world. The drum frees the narrator from the rigidity of convention and gives the novel a free-flowing stylistic plurality: the way Oskar disrupts a Nazi troop march hiding under the dais and drumming all the crazy tunes his drum can summon, or the way Oskar makes his audience in the onion cellar club go back, regress to their childhood literally making them piss in their clothes with his metrical rhythms. The Tin Drum is a protest, a protest against insincerity and heralds the chaotic nature of existence and experience in post war Europe. ( To be continued)