As a child I wondered about The Tin Drum the same way I wondered about Ulysses: a thick book with an intimidating title and a history of being talked about. Having just finished it, I want to better understand why it is known as one of the 100 best books of all time, and the best German novel since the end of World War II. I do that the same way Oskar tries to understand his life: through writing.
A Bizarre Journey
This book is cray. Like Pynchon‘s Gravity’s Rainbow, which makes me think Pynchon probably read it. Things that happen here we have to second guess, simply because as we learn from the first page, our narrator Oskar is writing his story in an insane asylum. This is an important point: for an unreliable narrator to “work” in fiction, we must know immediately that he is unreliable. Or else, the author’s narratorial authority is in question, which makes a reader move from thinking, this character is crazy to this author is crazy (and not in the Ezra Pound way).
More than one unreliable narrator is acceptable, and even preferential, as long as there is an omniscient third person or the novel’s form reflects the author’s authority. Take As I Lay Dying, where characters’ perspectives are reflected by their names atop each chapter. Every character is unreliable, some more than others. This helps the reader participate in judging the story. Once we understand that Oskar is crazy, we consent to keep reading, as long as he (Grass) entertains. Grass does not disappoint. Scenes revolve around fishermen using horse heads as eel bait, theft involving glass hole-poking screams, and indirect death by sparrows.
Magical Realism
The overall effect of this strangeness is akin to magical realism. Looking at events in this novel and comparing them to others, such as the octopus on the Atlantic Wall in Gravity’s Rainbow, I read the absurd and imaginative as a reaction to the nihilism and existentialism of wartime. Perhaps the hysterical and bizarre is still in vogue.
It always is. Humans love the strange and otherworldly. That’s why fantasy fiction sells so well, and novels about office life have more trouble hitting the shelves. Murakami and Rushdie are two authors who make good use of fantastical effects, and as a result their work lies within a realm of high literature. Because writing about real life in an interesting way is very difficult.
The Tin Drum is a bildungsroman, a kunstlerroman, since Oskar’s experience as musician is mostly about Danzig and the Rhine region with the war era as context. His story is not about the war, it is about the live of a midget madman. With its bombardment of strange and uncanny features, we enter into the realm of mythic journey, which has led to its classic status.
Don Oskar
The greatest and first novel is all about unreliable narrators. This, descended from Don Quixote, has continually informed the essence of the novel. This is how blog writing has gained such approval so quickly. The effect of the blog on the novel, will be to induce greater subjectivity into the genre, which has lasted so long for the very reason of its exploration into unreliable narrators. Fiction of today is often told in a blend of memoir, autobiography and pure literary fictiveness. Must we continue to separate and distinguish these three genres? Let truth be whatever we imagine, whatever we remember, whatever we tell ourselves to go to sleep at night. Relativism? Why not? Take it with a grain of salt, at least when it recognizes that it’s not Truth.
Drum, Memory
The reason The Tin Drum is great is it calls upon both imagination, our faculty to create, and memory, our faculty to reason. Like all great fiction, we are forced to imagine ourselves in Oskar’s place, looking into our past and our culture for meaning mean. In the end, we look for our own drum, a symbol that helps us keep drumming away.
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