Narrative Vagueness in Grass’s the Tin Drum: A TextCentric Model of Narration to Reveal Dialogized Heteroglossia

The present study sets out to investigate the narrator’s textual position in grass’sthe tin drum. although authorial self-dramatization through affinities with one ormore characters in the work is undeniable, this study mainly concentrates on theinner interpenetrations of heteroglot utterances as uttered by an unreliable firstperson narrator, oskar matzerath, in the light of the bakhtinian concepts ofcarnivalesque and polyphony. through the evasiveness and irresponsibility of thenarrator’s act of story-telling, a carnivalesque world is created—a world in whichnumerous marginalized, unvoiced, and alien utterances interact with thephallocentric as well as the logocentric forces of the dominant culture. in brief, thepresent study made use of the notion of narrative vagueness in grass’s the tindrum to demonstrate the bakhtinian sociodialectical principle operating through thestratified, heteroglot utterances of other-speechedness, a functional and yet thematicprinciple working through the tempospatial, chronotopic nature of languages.