''The Rat'' (german: Die Rättin, literally ''The Ratess'') is a 1986 novel by the German writer
Günter Grass.
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
''The Tin Drum'' (german: Die Blechtrommel, ) is a 1959 novel by Günter Grass. The novel is the first book of Grass's ' ('' Danzig Trilogy''). It was adapted into a 1979 film, which won both the 1979 Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Bes ...
'' 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'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 and the restoration of the 50s, from the dead forests and the dying power of
Fairy Tales 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
The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the No. 4 reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union. It is one of only two nucl ...
, 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
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded yearly by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute for outstanding discoveries in physiology or medicine. The Nobel Prize is not a single prize, but five separate prizes that, according ...
, and discoverer of the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid,
Francis Crick and
James Watson.
Reception
Janette Turner Hospital 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 d ...
'' called the book an "exhilarating, exhausting, maddening, brilliant, funny and profoundly disturbing novel".
See also
*
1986 in literature
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1986.
Events
* April 29 – A major fire at Los Angeles Public Library caused by arson destroys 400,000 volumes.
* July 21 – Michael Grade, Controller of BBC1, axe ...
*
German literature
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rat, The
1986 German novels
German-language novels
Novels by Günter Grass