Kafka's "Burrow": A Speculative Analysis

Abstract

Kafka wrote Burrow (Der Bau) in 1923 during the final stage of his terminal illness. It is probably the last manuscript of any magnitude to tax the author's declining health. The subterranean narrator-the last of Kafka's humanized animals-is a creature of many moods and dispositions. Generically speaking, he is a hybrid of rational Man and instinctive animal. The lonely and capricious narrator is alternately rational and irrational, confident and fearful, passive and recklessly militant. Each frame of mind is distinctly portrayed, but the reasons for his many volatile moods are almost always ambiguous. Because his levels of joy and despair often seem out of proportion to his life's circumstance and stated reasons, he is a paradox. In the past scholars have hardly been reluctant to tackle Kafka's many enigmas and paradoxical personalities, and yet proportionate to the voluminous mass of existing Kafka criticism, Burrow has attracted only a modicum of critical attention. And for the most part the existing criticism is either fragmentary, unnecessarily abstract, or simply trite. One popular approach to the story sees the burrow itself as an elaborate metaphor for the Mind which is out of tune with external reality. Lienhard Bergel, for example, identifies the central theme as the narrator's hopeless effort to construct a rational world entirely of his own creation within the framework of a world dominated by irrationality.1 Granted, the narrator is a self-centered hermit and a solipsist, but it is difficult to reduce the burrow to a pure construction of the Mind. In the same metaphysical vein, others have viewed the story as a religious allegory. R. M. Alberes and Pierre de Boisdeffre have suggested that the narrator is so hopelessly involved with the task of