Tin Drum: Murder -JK

            The farther I got into the novel the less I trusted Oskar, and the more disturbed I became with the story. The unsettling nature of the work was powerful, the fact that the issues such as sex war and death are being taken on by a man in a child’s body added to the twisted structure of the Tin Drum.  While Oskar provides us with evidence to prove he is not guilty of killing Sister Dorothea I believe he is the one who killed her.

            Oskar is obsessed with being a child, for he can lack of emotion and empathy, yet he takes it to another level, for the extent to which he is cold and distant is not childlike at all. His appearance is a façade, a way to act cruel and not be punished for it.  His placement into a mental hospital is fitting, for his actions throughout the novel are filled with madness.  

            He uses his obsessions to glaze over death and murder. Earlier in the work Oskar kept trying to force Jan to get him the new drum off of the shelf during an attack. He described a shell hitting Kobyella, and yet his focus shifts, within the same line, to the drum which is now within reach thanks to the shell. It is only after he gets a new drum does he then address the injured body of Kobyella (217). The jumps in focus do not diminish the violence, instead it adds to it, as a childish obsession highlights the intense actions.

            When it comes to Sister Dorothea, his obsession with her finger, praying over it and preserving it may have convinced Vittlar of Oskar’s innocence I think it simply fits into Oskar’s way of dealing with death, focusing on something trivial in the scope of the entire issue. Oskar was too calm when discovering the finger; his description of the Sister did not lead me to believe he could simply look at the finger and immediately know who it belonged to.  I see his obsessive love for the nurse as a motive, and just as his drums were destroyed by his constant usage, I think he destroyed Sister Dorothea.