Oskar Matzerath Timeline and Summary

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• Oskar Matzerath is born in 1924 with a fully adult mind and immediately decides the adult world is a terrible place.
• After getting a tin drum for his third birthday, he decides to stop growing and starts to play the drum obsessively as a way of escaping from the real world.
• He's not sure if his father is Alfred Matzerath (his mother's husband) or her cousin Jan Bronski, with whom she's been having a long affair.
• Oskar gets fed up by the adults around him acting ridiculous and corrupt.
• Obsessed with drumming, Oskar needs a steady supply of new drums and goes regularly with his mother to Sigismund Markus's toy store.
• Oskar's mother dies from gorging on fish. It might have been suicide because she couldn't tolerate her love triangle. Oskar now only has the father Alfred to raise him.
• At sixteen, Oskar has a sexual awakening and is attracted to Maria, a young woman that his father hired to help out at the shop after his mother's death.
• Oskar takes advantage of this familiarity while sharing a bed with Maria and has sex with her. A while later, Maria has a child named Kurt, who Oskar is convinced is his son.
• After the Nazis destroy all the synagogues and businesses in Danzig, including Markus's toy shop, Oskar convinces Jan Bronski take him to the Polish Post Office, where there's a janitor who can repair Oskar's drum.
• Jan is killed when the Nazis attack the building. Oskar admits he pointed an accusatory finger at Jan in order to save himself. He turns in his own (possible) father.
• Oskar leaves Danzig to join a travelling circus troupe with other little people and falls in love with another little person named Roswitha Raguna.
• Oskar returns home after Roswitha is killed during the invasion of Normandy.
• He starts wandering around the city of Danzig and becomes the leader of a group of young terrorists called "The Dusters." They use his glass-shattering voice as a weapon of mass destruction.
• Toward the end of the War, the Russians invade Danzig while Oskar and his family hide in the cellar, but Alfred Matzerath is killed. Oskar feels responsible.
• At Matzerath's funeral, Oskar decides that now that his two father figures are gone, it's time to strike out on his own. He throws his drum into Matzerath's grave and decides never to play again. He decides to start growing again.
• This sudden growth spurt makes him very sick, and he spends a long time in the hospital.
• After his release, he moves with Maria and his son (brother) Kurt to Düsseldorf, where he finds work engraving gravestones and posing as an artist's model.
• When Maria refuses to marry him, he rents a room in a house shared by a mysterious woman named Sister Dorothea, with whom he becomes obsessed.
• He meets another housemate, a musician, and they form a successful jazz band. Oskar's asked to do a solo tour and becomes rich and famous.
• One day, he finds a human finger (gross), which turns out to belong to Sister Dorothea, who's been murdered. He decides to confess to the murder so he'll get locked up in an asylum and have some peace and quiet.
• The book ends with a thirty-year-old, four-feet-one-inch Oskar writing his memoirs in the asylum and reflecting on all the death he's seen in his life.