The Tin Drum Analysis

Most of this book is set in Oskar's hometown, the city of Danzig, which is today known as Gdansk, a port city in Poland. Permit Shmoop a bit of history: After World War I, The League of Nations (pr...

The funny thing about Oskar is that he's a first-person narrator who seems to think he's a third-person narrator. Throughout this book, Oskar makes some pretty outrageous claims about what he can r...

The overall book is a realistic portrait of a young man growing up in pre- and postwar Poland and Germany, filled with authentic detail about real people and places. But within this otherwise reali...

One of the reasons why reading this novel can be disturbing is that Oskar can be a very difficult character to sympathize with. After all, the guy talks about the deaths of those closest to him wit...

One thing you'll no doubt notice about this book's writing style is that its sentences can get really, really long and complex. For example, take a look at the length and the fancy language of this...

Black was the Cook always somewhere behind me.And now she comes toward me at last all in black.Her words and her garments all twisted and black. And the debts she pays are all paid in black.And chi...

Many things make this book a challenging read. It's almost 600 pages long and translated from the German. The events jump around in time and there are lots of local and historical references that m...

Skirts, Drums, and One Heckuva VoiceMeet the narrator of this book, Oskar Matzerath, a thirty-year old man living in an insane asylum writing his life story. Oskar informs us that he was born with...

Anticipation Stage and 'Fall' Into the Other WorldIt's not easy to categorize The Tin Drum according to Booker's standard plots. The chronology jumps around, we often don't know what's really happe...

Günter Grass makes it fairly easy for us to think of this book in three acts, since he divides the thing into three separate books. Book One gives us the scoop on how Oskar's mother was conceived...

In his younger years, Grass was a member of the Hitler Youth (that's bad). (Source) Grass fought in World War II and was wounded in 1945 when he was only 18 years old. He ended up being in an Ameri...

We're being generous with our "R." This book is filled with graphic sex scenes—adult/child sex, creepy Boy Scout leaders, orgies, adultery, nudity, rape, masturbation, fetishism, you name it. Our...

Helpful Hint: The 2009 translation by Breon Mitchell has a very handy glossary in the back explaining a lot of the historical and cultural references in the novel. It's a huge help. We'll explain s...