Volume 1, Number 2 · June 1, 1963
A New Beat
By Steven Marcus
The Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
Pantheon, $6.95
Oskar Matzerath, the narrator and protagonist of Günter Grass' The Tin Drum, is a thirty-year-old hump-backed inmate of a mental hospital. Born in the city of Danzig in 1924, Oskar was 'one of those clairaudient infants whose mental development is completed at birth and after that merely needs a certain amount of filling in.' The son of petty bourgeois shopkeeping parents, Oskar hears two things immediately after he is born: first his father's statement that his son will take over the store when he grows up. The next words are his mother's: 'When little Oskar is three, he will have a toy drum.' Oskar quickly comes to a decision that he 'would never under any circumstances be a grocer, that I would stop right there, remain as I was—and so I did.' On his third birthday, he gets his toy drum, flings himself down a flight of stairs, and stops growing—and for many years thereafter 'I not only stayed the same size but clung to the same attire.' In order to be 'exempted from the big and little catechism,' in order to 'avoid playing the cash register,' Oskar makes the modern grand refusal: he refuses to 'grow up.' He remains a three-year-old drummer—superior, detached, demonic, complete in his deformity.
Review, 1721 words
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