SOURCE: "Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum)," in Günter Grass, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1969, pp. 52-86.

Cunliffe is an English-born scholar of German history and literature. In the following excerpt, he presents a detailed examination of the main characters and major themes in the first section of The Tin Drum.

[The madness of The Tin Drum's main character and narrator, Oskar,] has no historic parallels and none of the associations with Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and Beethoven that lend grandeur to Thomas Mann's Adrian Leverkühn. Oskar is not a case of "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown," but rather of "a tale told by an idiot / Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

The sound and fury are represented, in the first place, by the title's tin drum which Oskar belabors to summon up the past. The drum is childish as well as militaristic and aggressive...