The Tin Drum is as quintessential a novel about the outsider as Albert Camus's L'Etranger. The most obvious outsider is Oskar himself, physically distinguishable from most of the characters by his dwarfism, but also set apart from everyone else by his peculiar vocal glass-shattering abilities. Neither a boy nor man, Oskar has a unique view of the world, twisted and magnified, through the eyes of a child but the mind of an adult. Yet he doesn't seem to notice that almost everyone he meets is an outsider too: Meyn, the lonely trumpeter; Sister Dorothea, the nurse no-one sees; even Oskar's mother Agnes, who like so many of the characters has convoluted sexual relationships. Under the totalitarian rule of the Nazis, the assimilation and forced inclusiveness of fascism has created a city of isolated, lonely people. Oskar's dwarfism symbolises the reduction to impotence of the individual in and by society. Yet by presenting all the characters that people his novel as outsiders, Grass is drawing us into being part of it; by being outside the novel we are outsiders too. We're supposed to be alienated and repulsed by the amorality and immorality of this novel. Unlike the characters, we are supposed to look for morality ourselves. Though he lets persecution, rape and murder pass without comment, Grass's novel retains this didactic edge: his frustrated urge that we seek out the moral heart in everything, something that those who were cogs in the Nazi machine failed to do.

In his opening chapter and with Oskar's opening line ("Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital") in particular, Grass establishes that this is not going to be an unquestionable historical though fictionalised memoir. Were it just a document of life under the Nazis, then it would be no more than that. It would be a historical source rather than a literary novel. History here is constructed, fictionalised, remembered at a later date and indeed misremembered too. Though for these 550 odd pages we are inside the head of Oskar Matzerath, we are only seeing the world as far as he is letting us. Two sections (the inclusion of transcripts from Bruno and Vittlar) show us alternative perspectives. The Bruno section is important in that he notes how Oskar's memory is flawed, and how he changes his mind on the details. The Vittlar section is interesting in that it lets us see Oskar from the position that he sees the rest of the world: that of an outsider. We have been inside his head, and now we are outside it. We may have let his neuroses and strange behaviour pass before, but now seen objectively, we are perhaps moved to doubt his sanity.

These transcripts are important in emphasising the theme of dissociation. It is significant that Oskar refers to himself both in the first and third person throughout the novel. Whilst it's true that we only ever see the world from a subjective perspective, Oskar's use of the third person when talking about himself highlights how detached he feels from his own past. After all, when the novel reverts to the present, Oskar usually refers to himself in the first person. The impression we might get from this, then, is of Oskar as the author, constructing himself from his asylum bed. He can find no meaningful pattern in the world beyond it. He can represent reality but he can't understand it. That he writes from one restricted state (i.e. the mental hospital) about another (i.e. the Nazi-occupied city of Danzig) informs his viewpoint. Oskar is both prisoner and victim, and has been for most of his life. Therefore it's not surprising he can't conceive of reality in a conventional way. His perspective has always been skewed, and not always by his dwarfism.

If it's not possible to like Oskar as a character, then it is this question of his sanity that suitably intrigues us to continue reading. Given that this is his own account, however, it's important to consider whether his madness is merely more self-construction, and then wonder why he would want us to think he is mad. He does this because he wants to escape responsibility. He convinces us that he chooses to remain a dwarf but can grow at random because he wants to remain a child. He fears adulthood, because adulthood brings responsibility, and thus guilt. As a child he can remain an innocent and not receive any of the blame for what happens around him under the Nazi occupation. Loss of innocence is a pre-requisite in the maturation process, but this is no bildungsroman, despite the initial appearance of such an epic form. Oskar clings onto his tin drums throughout - all pointedly identical to the one he received on his third birthday - as symbols of his perpetual childhood.

Oskar's tin drum is an escape mechanism. He drums on it and feels like he is using it to communicate. It's his way of making sense of a senseless world. When he actually is a child we accept this behaviour is normal, but when he doesn't stop in adolescence we start to believe we can use this is as evidence of his doubtful sanity. However, Oskar is not alone in this kind of activity. It is no more neurotic behaviour than Bruno's knot-work, where he creates images of the world through knotted string and then setting them hard. Yet Bruno is Oskar's "keeper", as he refers to him, in this mental asylum, despite this similarity. Bruno is another of the novel's many outsiders, introduced as "unmarried and childless". Through his transcript in particular we are moved to question Oskar's mindset, but Bruno doesn't seem to realise that he's making the same myopic mistakes Oskar is relating to him. He's no more seeing the real world than Oskar, and belongs on Oskar's side of the peephole as much as his dwarven charge. Their relationship highlights the theme of detachment, to the point where Bruno is so dissociated he doesn't even realise it.

The idea of people being out of touch with themselves as much as with others is most memorably explored in Oskar's visits to the Onion Cellar after the end of the war. Here people come to peel onions and listen to Oskar's drumming, which conjures up images they are incapable of creating themselves, allowing them to cry, something they are unable to do on their own. These scenes do at first seem like whimsical madness on both Grass and Oskar's part, but their metaphorical, historical and contextual ramifications resonate. The people who go to this club are Germany's lost generation, the youth that grew up under Nazi brainwashing only to discover the real world outside the Third Reich is a much better place. To discover they were so fatally wrong has filled them with self-doubt. Though the Nazi regime may have gone now, they have yet to make this transition to the real world, primarily because in the real world they must accept responsibility for their part in history. Oskar's drumming conjures up images of their innocent childhood that so move these people because they are detached from this history. They are not ready to move into the real world until they have come to terms with the past because the real world is the sum of the past. They may see themselves as being at the end of history, but today is only the end of history until tomorrow.

With regards to Oskar's own relationship to history, his grandmother Anna is an important character, as she represents this relationship. It is significant that Grass chose to start the story with Anna being impregnated rather than Oskar's own birth. Anna is a true witness to history in a novel where most of the characters are victims to it. She always wears four identical skirts, and it's to these that Oskar returns whenever he wishes to hide from the real world. He has a kind of skewed Oedipal complex about his grandmother. Hiding beneath her skirts is like returning to the womb, but it was whilst also hiding beneath her skirts that the chased Joseph Koljaiczek contributed his part to Oskar's mother's conception. A visit under Anna's skirt, therefore, is symbolic of both returning to the womb but also rebirth. Oskar claims he "lost his innocence more than once and recovered it or waited for it to grow in again." If this is so, then he need never mature into an adult. Insanity is just regression into childhood neurosis, imagination, superstition and, with a complimentary trip beneath grandma's skirts, innocence.

Oskar's unconventional maturation (or rather, his struggle against it) is juxtaposed against history. Grass sticks to a chronological telling of his story because that is the only plausible representation of reality. It would make more sense to tell Oskar's story from the point where he enters it, but that would require flashbacks to bring in Anna Bronski, a technique that delineates the linear, realistic nature of time, jeopardising our belief in the novel's internal concerns with reality. By first growing, then stopping, then regressing internally, then growing physically some more before stopping again, Oskar is symbolic of the outsider to history. Whilst the rest of us might be prisoners to the processes of time, we too remain outsiders to it. History is bigger than all of us. It happens around us. In the novel this is highlighted by the references to economic reform. The nature of this reform is never explained to the reader, effects all the characters, but nobody inside the novel seems to have any say in it. It effects people, but doesn't involve them. This is not really any different from the Nazi regime. This economic reform is apparently the greatest thing to happen to German society in modern times, but this society seems to have become a construct including all people whether they want it or not - a hangover from the Nazi era - rather than the sum of all its parts. History happens to people. People get caught up in it. One of the key themes of the novel is about collective guilt for getting caught up in the causing of history, often without knowing it.

If there are those who cause history, there must also be those who are victims to it. The novel is full of them. The Holocaust factors in with the persecution of Jewish shop owner Sigismund Markus and the tragic cameo appearance of Treblinka survivor Mr Fajngold. Jan Bronski, the man with whom Oskar's mother has an affair, dies resisting the Nazi invasion. However, rather than simply make this a diatribe against the Nazi regime, which it already is anyway, Grass also details how Soviet soldiers kill Oskar's father Matzerath and rape Lena Greff in front of Oskar. Whilst the villains of the novel are undoubtedly the Nazis, Grass is emphasising how the men behind the evil extremes of history are not just Germans, and not just restricted to the era in which Oskar writes. History did not start with Oskar's birth in 1925 and does not end with his thirtieth birthday in 1955. Anna's inclusion at the start of the novel has already confirmed this for us.

History is far too vast, incomprehensible and scary for anybody within the world of the novel (and indeed, us outside it) to contemplate. Oskar only ever sees the small details. He sees the suicide of Sigismund Markus on Kristallnacht only in terms of the fact that he no longer has a supplier of drums. This is not merely a case of deplorable self-absorption on Oskar's part. It's more a case of self-denial. During an air raid toward the end of the war he is busy making love to fellow dwarf Roswitha and when the Soviet troops arrive and kill Matzerath, he is preoccupied by ants, sugar and stew. This is the self-deception of those too scared to open their eyes to the larger world around them. Grass always claimed this novel was not autobiographical, though in an abstract, representational way, it might be. As a prisoner-of-war following the cessation of hostilities he was taken to Dachau and refused to believe it was real. It was easier for him to shut it out and deny it than accept it as real and face the consequences of his part, as a fighter for Germany, in being responsible for it.

Whilst Grass was also a tombstone carver, also slept in a converted bathroom and also had an uncle who died defending the Polish Post Office, he tries to convince us that Oskar is not him by making Oskar a non-combatant. Yet when Oskar barely notices the war raging around him, we are moved to wonder. The start of the war is only acknowledged when Oskar is personally effected and it ends in a single sentence. Oskar barely notices because he has, as an outsider to history and society, been fighting a war against the world for a lot longer than six years. Oskar is Danzig, a city that has been a frequent victim of history, consistently attacked. Oskar barely notices the war because for him it is merely part of the destructive cycle. It has happened before, and it will happen again.

It is when Oskar leaves Danzig and abandons his drum at the end of the war that he begins to grow again physically. By throwing his drum into Matzerath's grave we are moved to believe that he is cutting ties with the symbol of his childhood and is ready to move on. Yet when he settles in Dusseldorf, he hasn't really changed. We see childish, petty jealousy over stepmother (and former lover) Maria's attentions for her (and perhaps Oskar's) son Kurt. Oskar doesn't grow in the post-war period. He is part of the same lost generation as the visitors to the Onion Cellar. We might wonder why a society alike in all being outsiders can't use this common ground as a stepping stone to moving on but the novel ends with no great climax, no great revelations and, at first reading, no great developments. Life, history and the world go on.

It is not accurate, however, to believe Oskar such a flat character. Good and bad, hero and villain - these are simplistic generalisations that suit Nazi ideology, not literary criticism. The temptation is to call Oskar an anti-hero, but he might be more than that. Is he not a hero for surviving history and retaining his own individual voice, however detestable we might find it? Günter Grass's intentions for Oskar are clear both within the novel and without. "Anyone born, like me, in the third decade of this century, cannot deny his share of the guilt for the great crime, even if he was very young at the time," Grass wrote of Oskar after The Tin Drum's publication. Oskar is most detestable when he allows both Bronski and Matzerath, two men of whom one was definitely his father, to die, and feels no guilt about it. Yet at the end of the novel he is accepting responsibility for the murder of his neighbour Sister Dorothea, a crime he did not commit. This is projected guilt. It is the first and final acceptance of his part in the deaths of Bronski and Matzerath. History may be too big for those living through it at the time to take responsibility for it, but guilt is the retrospective acceptance of that responsibility. It doesn't mean the past can be changed or the future will be different, but by staring the truths of the real world in the face for the first time, Oskar has finally matured into an adult.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Freedman, R. The Poet's Dilemma: The Narrative Worlds Of Günter Grass, article in "A Günter Grass Symposium", edited by A. Leslie Willson, University of Texas Press, 1971

Gordon Cunliffe, W. Günter Grass, Twayne Publishers, 1969

Hayman, R. Günter Grass, Methuen, 1985

Hollington, M. Günter Grass: The Writer In A Pluralist Society, Marion Boyars Publishers, 1980, 1987 reissue

Lewis White, R. Günter Grass In America: The Early Years, Georg Olms, 1981

Lothar Tank, K. Günter Grass, Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1969, translated by John Conway

Preece, J. The Life And Work Of Günter Grass: Literature, History, Politics, Palgrave, 2001

NOTES:
At that point, the quickest 3000 words I ever wrote. 600 one day, 400 the next, then 2000 the following afternoon. And I only wrote the plan the day before I started it. I don't know why I chose to do a unit on Postwar Fiction because I have no real interest in the period (all kudos to Carl Krockel for sustaining my interest, then). The spring semester was really lacking in terms of inspiring modules, so much so that I had to run off to the School of History to find a good one. At the time, "The Tin Drum" was the longest book I'd ever read (since usurped by "Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire", hohum), and despite the impression this essay gives to the contrary, I'm still not sure what it was about. In the end, I got 70% for this one.