Miles is an English dramatist, short story writer, novelist, author of children's literature, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, a small portion of which was reprinted in CLC-15, he discusses the literary influences of Herman Melville, Lawrence Sterne, and Thomas Mann on The Tin Drum, and examines Grass's portrayal of Oskar, who acts as commentator on "the character and history of the German people in the twentieth century."

In the following excerpt, Hollington discusses Grass's portrayal of bourgeois values in Nazi Germany.

Lawson is an American educator and author of several books and articles on German literature. In the following excerpt, he discusses the plot and characters of The Tin Drum, and explores Grass's use of symbolism throughout the novel.

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

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.

In the following excerpt, Tank discusses the reaction of European critics to The Tin Drum. He also examines Grass's working methods, the process of the novel's composition, and the book's main themes.

The Tin Drum has been called a picaresque novel, a Bildungsroman, and sheer pornography. In a famous account of modern German literature, Grass's style is described as "naturalistic … with an alloy of surrealist gags," and as "the attempt at a 'black' literature in Germany." I should like to approach his novels primarily as satires and to begin by considering The Tin Drum from the points of view of folklore, myth, and above all of literature. Certainly...

[The Tin Drum has] an epic range in its temporal and cultural matter [and] a largeness of vision which, in its own way, comprehends the tragicomic implications of personal existence and historical development. (p. 5) In confronting the structural variety and ambiguous richness of The Tin Drum, we find that they … derive from an extraordinary cornerstone—the functional complexity of the protagonist-narrator, Oskar Matzerath, whose creation is an achievement of imaginative and technical brillian...

Günter Grass's primary function, from The Tin Drum on, has been to be good for the German people. The Nazis had both etiolated and inflated the German language. Grass restored blood and particularity to it and hurled whole dictionaries at his readers. He did not and still does not write what Thomas Mann would call novels, since naturalistic fictional technique would have imposed on him the duty of depicting with gloomy accuracy the shameful ante and post and bellum times, the alternative being...

When Günter Grass's "Tin Drum" was published, Hans Magnus Enzensberger said it was a dish on which reviewers would gag for a decade. Grass's poems, available to Americans for the first time in [Selected Poems] are the dessert. The free-wheeling German romps with gusto through the brambles of his imagination, sticks his tongue out provocatively, or bewilders his audience with an innocence that is only slyly feigned. The poems are as iconoclastic as the novels, but tamer...