The Drum
The titular drum is not just a child’s plaything any more than the diminutive man is an eternal three-year-old. The drum is vitals—essential—to Oskar’s ability to communicate and this fact is subtly expressed in the fact that very often the reader will have to work to understand just what Oskar is actually trying to communicate. As just one example, his metaphorical view of the drum itself. Extricated from context this observation may seem utterly impossible to decode. That’s the good news. The bad news is that even when placed within context, it is pretty impenetrable:
“My drum is neither a frying pan that startles raw meat with artificial heat nor a dance floor for couples who aren't sure if they belong together.”
“I almost think the darkness was on Oskar's side.”
This is a metaphor that speaks directly to a particular incident involving Oskar and Maria and the obviously complexities associated with his sexuality. That said, it works on a much larger level that encompasses the entirety of the narrative. Oskar does live in a kind of perpetual state of darkness; the darkness of the world around him is what drives him to remain in his three-year-old body for so long. While his life is hardly one to be envied, it must be stated that the darkness surrounding Oskar is precisely what makes him so fascinating. For instance: this sentence is written in the first person and third person simultaneously. If you have ever been around people who do that in real life, you know how dark that combination of narcissism and insecurity can become. If not…read the book.
Oskar’s Scream
In addition to the magical realism of Oskar’s drum holding such great power, he is also invested with an ear-piercing scream capable of shattering glass as easily as it does daily lives of those within hearing distance. The scream plays a huge thematic role—as well as being an essential narrative device—over the course of the novel and as such offers plenty of opportunity of metaphorical language, such as this example which occurs after a kind of hiatus Oskar takes from using his scream which reveals his awareness of its power as well as his ability to exploit it:
“I screamed, I hadn't screamed in a long time, I filed my voice to a sharp, glass-cutting instrument once more, after its long rest”
The Photo Album
The chapter titled “The Photo Album” begin cryptically: “I am guarding a treasure.” That treasure turns out to be Oskar’s photo album and it takes just three paragraphs for the narration to lift upward in the lofty spheres of rich, dense metaphorical imagery in the form of a rhapsody about how nothing else in the world—even a novel—carries the ambitious scale of an album of collected photographs:
“May the good Lord in Heaven, that diligent amateur who photographs us from on high each Sunday and pastes us in his album, terribly foreshortened and more or less properly exposed, guide me safely through this my album, guide me safely through this my album, prevent me from any stops of unseemly length along the way, no matter how pleasurable”
Oskar the Wicked
Bebra is a circus midget (the author’s term) who is a survivor with whom Oskar can commiserate. It is Bebra who perhaps confers upon the strange, twisted narrator of this tale the ultimate metaphorical character description:
“You're wicked and vain, as befits a genius.”
A short while after this, it appears that Oskar has found it more than acceptable; even, perhaps, flattering when he almost casually describes himself as the:
“wicked and traitorous son that I am”
