Kafka frustrates. If asked to describe what it feels like to read his stories, I’d use that verb. Why? Because his protagonists trip over themselves—over and over and over again—by asking questions that receive non-answers. Each hero seems to live in a story world that is all middle, filled with his doubt about how he got into his predicament and if he’s getting out alive. (Pro tip: he maybe won’t.)
Many of Kafka’s stories are unfinished, lack a final act, or just feel incomplete. Many begin after an inciting incident—itself forever indefinable—took place. Why does the traveling salesman wake up as an insect? Why is Josef K on trial? Why does Land Surveyor K need permission from castle authorities? Will the bug-man escape his room? Is the defendant guilty? Will the seeker find the castle?
A great Kafka story is all question, no answer. All search, no discovery. All worry, no relief. No wonder I’m frustrated.
It’s even less of a wonder, though, why Kafka’s approach to storytelling is so invigorating. He captures the experience of living amid the cruel vicissitudes of modern life, where each of us are daily threatened by inscrutable forces from which we’re powerless to defend ourselves.
Is the source of my suffering a law I’ll never know? Did I do a bad thing? Can I overcome my family’s shame? Am I ever free from persecution? Is my anxiety unhealthy? Is my work meaningful? Is my disease real? Will any two readers, when pondering Kafka’s questions, answer them in the same way?
To read Kafka is to accept that shared questions, but never shared answers, are what unite us. Is that a frustrating claim to make? Absolutely.
So, let’s look closer. The Oxford American Dictionary & Thesaurus (2003) defines “frustrate” this way:
v.tr. 1 make (efforts) ineffective
2 prevent (a person) from achieving a purpose
3 (as frustrated adj.) a discontented because unable to achieve one’s desire […]
4 disappoint (a hope)
These definitions clarify my sense of things, point by point:
Kafka makes me, as a reader, feel ineffective. I can’t see the origin or the end of a hero’s predicament. The author’s stories begin in a crisis I can neither fully fathom nor manage.
His stories often end before resolution, so any hint of hero’s journey feels purposeless.
I’m left discontented because I rarely puzzle out what a protagonist wants to achieve.
And his heroes disappoint my hope. I sense that they would have never survived what Kafka might have devised for an end (if he had actually believed in them).
Let’s look at “The Burrow” (1931), one of Kafka’s zoomorphic stories1 where the main character is a mole2 imperiled by undefined surrounding threats. He spends 40-plus pages perpetually preparing his burrow for an invasion that never comes. Whether laying provisions in his Castle Keep, reinforcing tunnel walls, or pondering his shelter's most vulnerable entry point, the entirety of “The Burrow” is told through the mole's paranoid line of questioning.
Consider this moment when he is outside his burrow looking in:
What does this protection which I am looking at here from the outside amount to after all? Dare I estimate the danger which I run inside the burrow from observations which I make when outside? Can my enemies, to begin with, have any proper awareness of me if I am not in my burrow? A certain awareness of me they certainly have, but not full awareness. And is not that full awareness the real definition of a state of danger? So, the experiments I attempt here are only half-experiments or even less, calculated merely to reassure my fears and by giving me false reassurance to lay me open to great perils.
First off, that’s one self-aware mole.
Secondly, this passage provides a sample of what the larger story is made of: an unending, frenetic monologue unfurling from an unsettled, yet reasonable, mind.
Philip Rahv, in his introduction to a Modern Library edition of Kafka’s stories from 1952, saw this anxious, self-obsessed mode of writing as signs of neurosis. Rather than just a neurotic writing things down, however, Kafka was an inimitable “artist of neurosis,” Rahv proclaimed, who “succeeds in objectifying through imaginative means the states of mind typical of neurosis and hence in incorporating his private world into the public world we all live in.”
In 2020, critic Aaron Schuster updated the psychoanalytic take on “The Burrow” to make Kafka sound a bit keener. Schuster observed:
Kafka analyzes, with clinical precision, what might be called the neurosis of security (a Freudian will recognize here a model of obsessional neurosis), with its fear of the enemy, its insatiable need for defenses and its imperative of constant vigilance—as well as its agonizing uncertainty, its postponed grand plans, and its vacillation.
I would add that Kafka recorded questions about an existential anxiety about failing to foresee that transcends self and time. His anxious sensibility still resonates profoundly with a global readership nearly a century after his death.
Notice how the mole in “The Burrow” arrives at a justification for his persistent hemming and hawing. Through questions, he’s surmised that his preparations for pending dangers are inadequate. That his attempts to shore up the burrow thus far have been “only half-experiments” that have provided “false reassurance to lay me open to great perils.”
The mole isn’t just risk averse. His worry is constructive. It’s self-preservation. He’s asking lots of theoretical questions which keep the encounter with real risk at bay. He’s, quite modernly, ruminating, which the dictionary defines as “meditating,” “pondering,” or “chewing the cud.” Like an enlightened animal working slowly though some deep, important problems.3
I don't enjoy slogging through the muck of the mole’s doubt while I’m reading it. But I do love putting a Kafka story down every few pages and letting his doubts sully my own. Feeling the author’s unresolvable questions seep into to my brain, gumming up my thoughts. “What’s really outside the burrow that makes the mole so afraid?” “Is my house a burrow?” “Am I prepared for dangers I can’t define?” “Is failure inevitable?” “Will I always leave the garage door open?”
Like Kafka’s mole, I find no certain answers. But I recognize that I have time to ruminate, and that rumination, though temporary, is a form of inner existential salvation. To pursue answers inwardly, even if I will never find them in the surrounding world, is a soothing stall tactic. Hesitating to cross the edge of danger is a palliative for restless soul.
There are rich connections to be made between “The Burrow” and Kafka’s real life, as John Updike notes in his 1995 foreword to Kafka’s stories. The mole begins to fear the intrusion of a beast. This word choice is key, Updike writes, because Kafka used “the beast” (das Tier) as a nickname for his cough from tuberculosis, which killed him at age 40.
To metamorphosize the struggle with illness as a creature fighting inwardly to save itself from an unconquerable enemy—be it “the beast” or fear of the beast’s untimed yet inevitable arrival—is not only a vivid metaphor; it’s a literary coping mechanism.
Unlike Kafka, the mole never succumbs to his beast. The story, left unfinished, just ends with the mole waiting for the worst. Updike made good sense of this:
[We] are glad to leave the burrowing hero, fussily timorous and blithely carnivorous, where he is, apprehensively poised amid menaces more cosmic and comic than anything his claws could grapple with. “The Burrow” and “The Great Wall of China” belong at the summit of Kafka’s oeuvre. The German titles of both contain the word “Bau.” Kafka was obsessed with building, with work that is never done, that can never be done, that must always fall short of perfection.
“The Burrow” might be about incurable disease. It might be about the growing forces of anti-Semitism infecting Kafka’s Prague. It might be about a life clouded by a never-ending prospect of war. About the fear of professional inadequacy. The folly of obsessive behavior. The worthiness of distraction. Readers drawn to “The Burrow” will read its questions the same, but they each will formulate different, deeply personal answers.
Kafka’s stories persist as inescapable mental gauntlets. “The Burrow,” in its simplest form, asks us: “How will we die?” Differently, we each imagine. Some of us from old age. Others from disease. Some from war. Others from accident. A few from folly.
Almost none of us will attain certainty about the how and when we meet our ends. But we have time to ask the mole, “Will we at least be prepared?” Frustratingly, the mole never found out, though he was readier than most of us.
Cover image: Selected Short Stories of Franz Kafka. Introduced by Philip Rahv. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Random House (Modern Library), 1952.
John Updike noted this story taxonomy in his introduction to The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka, New York: Random House (The Schocken Kafka Library), 1995.
I know Kafka doesn’t explicitly call the creature a mole—or the man-turned-bug in The Metamorphosis a cockroach—but I’m calling the hero of “The Burrow” a mole. I credit the convincing analysis found in Aaron Schuster’s “Enjoy Your Security: On Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’” in Issue #113 of e-Flux.
The mole’s obsession is not always read as a manic nervous frenzy, either. Schuster notes that the mole derives pleasure from attending to his own security.