''The Rat'' (german: Die Rättin, literally ''The Ratess'') is a 1986 novel by the German writer

Günter Grass Günter Wilhelm Grass (born Graß; ; 16 October 1927 – 13 April 2015) was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in the Free City of Da ...

Structure and content

The plot is composed of many narrative strands and oscillates between fairytale, travelogue and surreal novel. It also contains cinematic perspectives and some poems. Grass incorporates some narrative threads of his success novels '' The Tin Drum'' as well as the ''Butt''; further passages on maritime disasters, the sinking of the ''Wilhelm Gustloff'', anticipate aspects of his book ''Crabwalk''. Grass has conceived the novel as a counter-image to

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (, ; 22 January 1729 – 15 February 1781) was a philosopher, dramatist, publicist and art critic, and a representative of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the developmen ...

's picture of the education of the human race: Humanity (Grass used deliberately old-fashioned word "mankind") have indeed learned "the virtue to eat with spoons, diligently the subjunctive and practice tolerance", all enlightenment but not their tendency to get their violence under control. In the dreams of the narrator, who seems to be in a spaceship orbiting the devastated earth, a speaking female rat compels the narrator to review the destruction of humanity, and follow their dominant position by rats. Rats build accordingly, in a world destroyed through deforestation, pollution, and nuclear warfare, a new civilization based on solidarity. Against this vision, the narrator developed his own stories leading up to the nuclear apocalypse, partly as film scripts for the including by porn series to Medienzar Oskar Matzerath, the painter

Lothar Malskat Lothar Malskat (May 3, 1913 – February 10, 1988) was a German painter and art restorer who repainted medieval frescoes of the Marienkirche in Lübeck, critically damaged during WWII. Life and career Malskat was a painter from Königsber ...

and the restoration of the 50s, from the dead forests and the dying power of

Fairy Tales A fairy tale (alternative names include fairytale, fairy story, magic tale, or wonder tale) is a short story that belongs to the folklore genre. Such stories typically feature magic, enchantments, and mythical or fanciful beings. In most cult ...

and five beloved women who make up the Baltic officially investigating the local jellyfish population and secretly in search of the legendary Vineta as a place of female utopia. In addition, among other things, the Smurfs are in the German forest road and the Grimm brothers temporarily take over the government. He lived through the (alleged) downfall of mankind once again based on the fates of different people. In a final conversation between the Rats and the narrator, the foregoing is in jeopardy. The two can not agree whether the She-rat is just a dream of the narrator, or whether this is - along with the rest of humanity - merely a figment of the imagination of remaining on earth rat. The first third initially original, imaginatively laid possibilities of his polyphonic narrative concept is not further developed and used in the other part.

Background and references

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster, a few months after the book, gave the author a certain daily topicality. Grass took, among others, the inclusion of genetically modified rat-men, the "Watsoncricks" further controversies about the genetic engineering terms. The name alludes to the Watson Crick Nobel Prize in Medicine, and discoverer of the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid,

Francis Crick Francis Harry Compton Crick (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004) was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist. He, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins played crucial roles in deciphering the helical struc ...

and

James Watson James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist. In 1953, he co-authored with Francis Crick the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Watson, Crick and ...

Reception

Janette Turner Hospital Janette Turner Hospital (née Turner) (born 1942) is an Australian-born novelist and short story writer who has lived most of her adult life in Canada or the United States, principally Boston (Massachusetts), Kingston (Ontario) and Columbia (South ...

of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' called the book an "exhilarating, exhausting, maddening, brilliant, funny and profoundly disturbing novel".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rat, The 1986 German novels German-language novels Novels by Günter Grass

Structure and content

Background and references

Reception

See also

References