[The Tin Drum has] an epic range in its temporal and cultural matter [and] a largeness of vision which, in its own way, comprehends the tragicomic implications of personal existence and historical development. (p. 5)

In confronting the structural variety and ambiguous richness of The Tin Drum, we find that they … derive from an extraordinary cornerstone—the functional complexity of the protagonist-narrator, Oskar Matzerath, whose creation is an achievement of imaginative and technical brilliance. As a result of Oskar's bizarre stance and strange capabilities, Grass manages to combine features of the most disparate novelistic forms as well as provide multiple perspectives on his social and historical materials.

Grass's most obvious departure from convention was to make Oskar a dwarf and a highly unusual one at that. (p. 6)

Though The Tin Drum is not a historical novel in the strictest sense, it is firmly embedded in a recent, particularized (and for these reasons highly convincing) historical matrix. Oskar's family history through three generations unfolds between 1899 and 1945 in the highly charged political and cultural tensions of Danzig and from 1945 to 1953 amid the post-war contradictions of West Germany…. Such "placing" inclines us to regard him (with certain reservations) primarily as a real person in an immediately real world and, therefore, capable of being influenced by that world. Thus, even though Oskar outrages us frequently, we have some encouragement to sympathize and identify humanly with him. (Perhaps he is so upsetting to us at times, because he seems potentially "one of us"….) (pp. 7-8)

[But Oskar's characterization is not] wholly consistent with the limitations implicit in the surface realism of the novel. Grass has endowed him with several powers of a kind ordinarily encountered only in fantasy, including precocious adult awareness from birth, and the ability to arrest arbitrarily his normal physical growth at the age of three and to commence it again, ostensibly by choice, some years later. (p. 8)

[These capabilities make Oskar] doubly an outsider. Not merely is he a freakish "exceptional child" freed from conforming to conventional patterns of development; almost as if by virtue of his supernatural awareness, unique abilities, and shrewd willfulness he stands above adults in the normal world, marching to his own drumming, exploiting the climate of license in which he moves.

This relationship to society suggests in some obvious ways the stance of the picaresque hero, as critics have frequently noted. Like the Spanish picaro, Oskar stands socially, morally, and to an often surprising extent, emotionally removed from the events around him. He makes his way through the world largely on his own terms, confident in his ability to manipulate and survive. Where the picaro moves up and down the social-class structure, usually in the role of a resourceful servant, Oskar by virtue of his small size and seeming insignificance enjoys considerable mobility and can turn up in the most improbable places. As an observer he enjoys an additional advantage: people around him assume unthinkingly that his arrested growth extends to his mental development as well, an impression he deliberately cultivates. Accordingly, no one pays any serious attention to him, and he comes and goes freely, witness to the most private acts of family, neighbors, and even public figures.

Characteristically, picaresque fiction lends itself to satire because the picaro's mobility provides a wide range of material for satiric attack and an appropriately detached viewpoint. If in The Tin Drum Grass is an eclectic novelist incorporating a surprising number of fictional modes, he is not least of all a satirist. His targets range from the quixotism of Polish patriotism to the morally bankrupt aestheticism of the Nazis; from the petty pleasures of the petite bourgeoisie between the wars to the indulgence of post-war Germans in excesses of guilt; from the shallowness of postwar German materialism to the special lunacies of modern art. For all such subjects, Oskar is a remarkably effective satiristic medium, an advantageously placed reflector of what is outside himself. (pp. 8-9)

Grass himself acknowledged that his novel was indebted to the form of the picaresque novel, in the same breath observing that it was similarly descended from the Bildungsroman…. To see how Grass has spanned these genres is to grasp in part Oskar's psychological complexity. (p. 9)

From his early years … Oskar has been searching for self-understanding in the way of a Bildungsroman protagonist. He is involved in a quest for identity which has intensified to the point of crisis as he lies in the mental institution writing his autobiography. Unquestionably, writing his story is his attempt to clarify and resolve that crisis. (p. 11)

One of the most persistent means by which Grass discloses Oskar's identity-quest—thereby emphasizing the inward focus characteristic of Bildungs-fiction—is the series of symbolic polarities in relation to which Oskar compulsively attempts to project and understand himself…. Grass's protagonist returns repeatedly to the opposition of Dionysus-Apollo—especially as exemplified in Rasputin and Goethe, those heroes of his idiosyncratic early education and figures of his own ambivalance ("my two souls," he calls them, echoing Faust)…. Similarly, Oskar persistently sees himself in relation to both Jesus and Satan. In the former comparison he seeks a bit desperately to realize a transcendental identity and mission, seeing himself as the offspring of a holy triangle (however comically ironic)…. [Disappointed] in his pleas for a miracle to build faith on, he responds with a psychologically predictable perversity, blasphemes Christ by setting himself up as the sacrilegious Jesus of the teenage-hoodlum Dusters…. (pp. 11-12)

[Women] are used to clarify symbolically the protagonist's spiritual struggle. Oskar's mother epitomizes certain paradoxes which lame Oskar in his quest for self-identity…. As Oskar's education in life continues, the contradictions of the feminine increasingly contribute to his spiritual and psychological ambivalence, in particular the tension between woman as spiritual ideal and woman as destructive force. (p. 12)

[Oskar's] conscious decision to grow … [is] a metaphor for acceptance of personal and social responsibility in the Bildungsroman sense. His physical growth is appropriately a painful ordeal (he becomes eventually an undersized hunchback rather than a dwarf), symbolizing the difficult and half-fearful reluctance he experiences now that he can (and must) pursue his identity independent of the deceased parental generation….

Oskar's inconclusive posture at the end of his narrative can hardly be called a triumph. His reluctance to leave the psychological shelter of the mental institution and face the challenges of the world outside is the obverse of the conventional pattern of development in the Bildungsroman. (p. 13)

Oskar's failures are not entirely due to his own shortcoming. If he is morally and psychically lamed, as symbolized by his grotesque hump, he is so (Grass seems to imply) because that is the inevitable effect of a barbaric and bored world on one of Oskar's sensibilities. Oskar cannot escape the moral imperative to accept human responsibility…. His difficulty to find some adequate basis and direction as he is impelled from within to come to terms with his life. Quite clearly to Oskar's credit, he ultimately finds the life of materialistic superficiality in post-war Germany ("the bourgeois smug" he had denoted prophetically in a satiric poem during the war) attractive to neither of the two souls in him…. [His] retreat to the mental institution and ambivalence about leaving suggest that such exploitation is out of harmony with the humanly significant direction his growth is seeking…. Grass surrounds his protagonist with a corrupting cultural environment, implying that in such a world the traditionally positive outcome of the Bildungsroman is no longer possible. (p. 14)

Viewing Oskar with some sympathy is not meant to oversimplify his character nor to deny that at times he is offensively amoral and spiritually impotent. Emphasizing the intensity of his human involvement should correct a view which sees him as exclusively responsible for such failures, regarding him primarily as picaro, more an influence than influenced…. [Grass managed to make Oskar so convincingly complex] by making him a dwarf and exploiting the natural and symbolic ambiguity of that position, by making him an uneven participant in the life around him by virtue of his limitations and relative disinclinations, but by allowing him some partial emergence from his purely dwarfish, ahuman position….

As if this were not enough, Oskar is given a drum on his third birthday…. On the psychological level … the drum can be seen as a crutch for Oskar's insecurities: "for without my drum I am always exposed and helpless," he says…. Clearly, reliance on the drum implies a stance inimical to normal adjustment, an aesthetic detachment opposed to social conformity. If the drum signifies an idiosyncratic limitation in Oskar, it is also paradoxically the symbol and means of his superiority, for his virtuoso mastery of it clearly marks him as an artist.

Through Oskar as drummer (… and litterateur, since he has created an extraordinary autobiography), Grass explores … the unique, lonely, demanding, powerful, and at times dehumanizing role of the artist…. Grass's inquiry seems to epitomize in Oskar several artistic stances simultaneously, including some which are ostensibly contradictory. What kind of artist is Oskar? In one simple way he is a drummer whose art is romantic self-expression, a means of celebrating his triumphs, of venting his sorrows. (pp. 15-16)

In another romantic perspective, Oskar is a drummer whose art mystically clarifies reality and truth. His drum is a medium of both memory and imagination through which he is able to reconstruct the past…. (p. 16)

The ramifications of Oskar's art do not end with these imaginative forays and mystical revelations, for the possession of such unusual powers presents opportunities for manipulation, whether for good or ill, and Oskar quickly discovers these exploitive possibilities. In his provocative exploration of these multiple tensions, Grass raises the central questions of the artist's relations to life and society, including the moral implications of his position. (pp. 16-17)

In Grass's treatment Oskar's stance as artist repeatedly yields ambiguity and paradox. (p. 17)

The implications of Oskar's artistic ambiguity are "both/and" rather than "either/or." Oskar's art can express the conscience of grieving humanity, as in the lyrical concluding chapter to Book One when he is contrasted with the artist-musician, Meyn, who sells out to the Nazis; but it is (in the perversity of its pied-piper musical magic) an analogue of Hitler's aesthetic entrancement of the German people….

In this sphere Grass's criticism of modern culture and of German culture, in particular, is relevant. While the artist may attempt to influence his age, his stance is at least as likely to be influenced by the culture in which he lives. Historically, as in the later nineteenth century, aestheticism wins adherents among the sensitive in proportion to the disillusioning conditions and values prevailing in a culture or an age. Oskar is not alone in being driven into the arms of aestheticism. (p. 18)

In his loosely rambling but probing analysis of the uses of art and the implications of the artist's role, Grass does not provide a single view or simple answers but rather paradox after paradox. The ambiguities central to Oskar's developmental problem reflect the challenges, anguish, and failures experienced by twentieth-century German artists and intellectuals and, finally, have their universal applications. Oskar's psychological and situational flexibility, more than anything else, allows Grass so many explorative opportunities.

The hero as detached picaro, the hero as involved apprentice to life, the hero as artist, the hero as existential man; the novel as social history, the novel as satire, the novel as philosophical inquiry, the novel as psychological study, the novel as tragicomedy, the novel as realism and the novel as symbolic imagination; offensive yet satisfying, amoral yet profoundly moral, pessimistic yet paradoxically affirmative: what a remarkable combination to be found in a single work, what a complex vision. And Oskar unifies it all. (p. 19)

H. Wayne Schow, "Functional Complexity of Grass's Oskar," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction (copyright © by James Dean Young 1978), Vol. XIX, No. 3, 1978, pp. 5-20.