What does the Tin Drum symbolize?
To “beat a tin drum” when used as an idiom means to create a disturbance in order to bring attention to a cause. This is based on an interpretation of the book where Oskar’s beating of his titular tin drum “symbolizes his protest against the middle-class mentality of his family and neighborhood.”
How does Oscar in The Tin Drum use his childish appearance?
Once he gets the drum, he decides to stop growing to avoid getting caught up in the crazy world of adults. He stays the size of a three-year-old for the next seventeen years. Throughout it all, he plays obsessively on this tin drum as some of the most horrific events of the 20th century swirl around him.
What magical realism is used in The Tin Drum?
Magical Realism
The overall book is a realistic portrait of a young man growing up in pre- and postwar Poland and Germany, filled with authentic detail about real people and places.
What is the plot of The Tin Drum?
Oskar Matzerath (David Bennent) is a very unusual boy. Refusing to leave the womb until promised a tin drum by his mother, Agnes (Angela Winkler), Oskar is reluctant to enter a world he sees as filled with hypocrisy and injustice, and vows on his third birthday to never grow up. Miraculously, he gets his wish. As the Nazis rise to power in Danzig, Oskar wills himself to remain a child, beating his tin drum incessantly and screaming in protest at the chaos surrounding him.The Tin Drum / Film synopsis
Where does the tin drum take place?
Danzig
The Tin Drum is the story of Oskar Matzerath, who is born in 1924 in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). Oskar relates his story thirty years later from his bed in a mental hospital. Much like the city in which he was born, Oskar’s heritage is a mixture of Kashubian, Polish, and German.
What does the drumming do for Oskar?
A red and white enameled tin drum is his mother’s gift to Oskar when he turns three. Oskar wears out and replaces identical drums. For Oskar, drumming becomes a means of expression and communication, and later, his means of survival. Red and white are in fact the national colors of Poland, his country of origin.
Is The Tin Drum a difficult read?
628 pages. I find this to be a very difficult novel to describe or to write about. It is sort of the story of Oscar Matzerath, narrated by him while in a mental institution in Germany in 1954.