Local Anesthetic (1969) was a departure from the style and length of the earlier works. Danzig is no longer the central location of the action and some critics criticized an insensitivity to the new locale. This departure possibly indicates a shift from Grass's exploring the problems of the Nazi heritage to the problems of newer generations of Germans. Many critics saw the novel as a commentary on the war in Vietnam, others as a criticism of liberalism, yet others as Grass's comment on the tiredness of middle age or the television age. In Local Anesthetic, Grass returns to the single narrator. It begins with Eberhard Starusch visiting an unnamed, philosophical dentist, who uses a television to distract patients from the pains of dentistry. Starusch comes to this dentist for advice, and the dentist's philosophies seem to be Grass's own.

Starusch also has a vivid fantasy life, which...