SOURCE: "Inconstant Harmony in The Tin Drum," Studies in the Novel, Vol. XIV, No. 1, Spring, 1982, pp. 66-81.

In the following excerpt, Olster examines the character Oskar, focusing specifically on the significance of his drumming.

At an early point in Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, a strange man gives Harry Haller a pamphlet to read in which the latter finds his tormented condition both described and generalized.

There are a good many people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry…. To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come...