Gunter Grass and The Tin Drum
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Gunter Grass is one of post-war Germany's major
novelists. He has been called the conscience
of post-war Germany. His book The Tin Drum
established his international fame. The novel's
protagonist, a dwarf named Oskar Matzerath tells
the story from a mental assylum. The novel attempts
an analysis of Nazism and is a brutal attack
on the values of the German middle-classes.
Grass' work is characterised by a strong sense of political commitment. The Tin Drum parodies many literary styles. The complex, self-contradictory narrator, is an amoral hero who narrates, like Saleem in Midnight's Children from an explicitly unreliable position. |