The Tin Drum - post II

Knowing that Oskar is remembering his childhood from the sanitised situation of a mental hospital it is becoming a question of working out what point he ends up there – is there something in his behaviour that triggers it, bearing in mind he is already acting up.

It’s odd reading this with a child of two and a half because if he turned into Oskar on his third birthday it is doubtful I would keep buying drums and smiling through the madness. I’d be in the mental ward not the child.

Bullet points between pages 55 – 101

* As his third birthday comes Oskar is given his drum and resolves to throw himself down the cellar stairs and land on his head to provide the medical justification to why he won’t grow and he discovers that he has the ability to smash glass with his high-pitched scream

* The scream is deployed whenever anyone tries to take away the drum and gets him into trouble at school when he ends up smashing most of the glass in the classroom as the teacher tries to wrestle the drum away

* All the time he remains a small backward boy that is the butt of other children’s curiosity and almost an affliction that his mother has to carry around as she goes between her lover, husband and music shop owning admirer

* Oskar climbs to the top of a tower and from there decides to smash the glass in the theatre and only comes down when he can see his mother coming leaving a bewildered public wondering just what caused most of the glass to shatter

More to come over the weekend…