Circles in The Tin Drum

The novel The Tin Drum has a very apparent cyclical theme, similar to One Hundred Years of Solitude. It can be seen most clearly through Oskar’s doubt of parentage. He first questions his own parentage because while his mother is married to Matzareth, Oskar often witnesses his mothers affair with Jan Bronski. This question comes up many times in the first section of the novel, but is often not merely a question of who is his biological father but rather who is his future self. He uses this uncertainty to explain why he feels that he does not have as strong a relationship with Matzareth as he does with Jan. The uncertainty comes to a full circle when Maria gives birth to Kurt. Since she had sex with Matzareth and Oskar (claims) to also have had intercourse with her, Oskar does not know if Kurt is his son or his brother. This uncertainty, while not quite as pervasive as the question of Oskar’s father, is recalled many times in the second half of the novel.

            However, one has to wonder if the cycles in this novel don’t fit together just a bit too well. There are many times throughout the novel in which Oskar corrects himself. For example, in book two, the narrator explains that what he previously wrote was not correct and that he is “not too well satisfied” (246). He also says, “wishing to stick to the truth, I shall try to circumvent Oskar’s pen and make a few corrections” (246). This follows along with what I wrote about in my last post which was that the there is a strange disconnect between the narrator and his younger self, which leads to a question of the reliability of the narrator.

            But too much emphasis is put on the reliability of narrators. A narrator can never be 100% reliable or 100% unreliable because the character should be realistic, and if an author has written the character with enough development they will mirror humans in the sense that they can never be entirely dichotomous. This is something that I believe Grass does well. The fact that we can never really be sure about the parentage, or ever really know if Oskar is truly mad or if the imbalance came from him being wrongly accused for a murder. Just as certainty or reliability is never wrapped up neatly in real life, it is not as clear cut in well written novels.