Stealing from the Classics: The Tin Drum
by Joshua Malbin on Jan.09, 2010, under Books
Late in Book Two Günther Grass builds one of his novel’s main climaxes. World War II is ending and Oskar Matzerath, the narrator and protagonist, attends his father’s funeral. There he plays horseshoes with a metal wreath and a cast-iron cross until he finally rings the post and makes a momentous decision: he will put down the tin drum he’s been beating since he was three years old and allow himself to grow for the first time since then.
Two small lessons here. The first is, don’t worry too much about making your symbolism heavy-handed. Oskar’s father literally chokes to death on his Nazi Party pin when the Russians arrive in Danzig, and as a result Oskar stops his incessant toy drumbeat and begins to emerge from an infantile state. (Though we soon learn he doesn’t make it all the way to normal adulthood but only to a slightly larger but now somewhat deformed midgethood. Presumably so too did Germany.) Not subtle, still satisfying.
The second is, the impact of a climax is heightened if you let the reader relax for a few pages afterward and absorb it. The climactic chapter “Should I or Shouldn’t I?” which ends with “Leo proclaiming to all the world: ‘He’s growing, he’s growing, he’s growing…’” is followed by this flash-forward to the mental institution from which Oskar narrates his life story:
Last night I was beset by hasty dreams. They were like friends on visiting days. One dream after another; one by one they came and went after telling me what dreams find worth telling; preposterous stories full of repetitions, monologues which could not be ignored, because they were declaimed in a voice that demanded attention and with the gestures of incompetent actors. When I tried to tell Bruno the stories at breakfast, I couldn’t get rid of them, because I had forgotten everything; Oskar has no talent for dreaming.
While Bruno cleared away the breakfast, I asked him as though in passing: “My dear Bruno, how tall am I exactly?”
Bruno set the little dish of jam on my coffee cup and said in tones of concern: “Why, Mr. Matzerath, you haven’t touched your jam.”
This goes on for three more pages, in the course of which we learn one or two more things (Oskar’s height at the time of telling the story, for example). For the most part, though, this is dialogue and description meant to be forgotten. Look at how that first paragraph says exactly nothing. It is filler, meant to register as filler and give the reader time to digest what came before it.