The Reader, the Rodent, and the Viral Regeneration of Fear: Kafka’s “The Burrow” as a Covid-19 Allegory

Abstract

Despite the varied responses to Covid-19 across the world, the pandemic created a universal culture of fear that reshaped human perception of public spaces, social relations, and the meaning of social distancing. In light of this, the article probes the polity of fear in Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow”, which I treat as a contemporary Covid-19 allegory. The article looks into the relationship between the abnormal actions of the animal-narrator in “The Burrow”, the identity crisis suffered by many modern-day individuals during the outbreak of the pandemic, and the paradox of reading within Kafka’s text. The process of reading Kafka’s story seems to provide a sound, logical, and coherent interpretation of its highly coded messages. However, in reality it cultivates a fearful, labyrinth-like network of manifold meanings, which are symbolically embodied in the continued acts of burrowing by Kafka’s underground animal, presumably a rodent, to secure its hidden place against possible intrusion. The article, on the one hand, shows that this animal–burrow and/or reader–text anxiety speaks to an apprehensive sense of physical disorientation and fragmented spatiality which individuals experienced in private and public spaces as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic. On the other hand, it reflects on relations between rodent/reader and their social environments, which can explicate the nature of social relations in contemporary cultures during the Covid-19 pandemic. The article shows how Kafka’s paradox of reading explicates the complex meanings of social interaction in a time of a viral pandemic and the fragile image of self-management in dangerous landscapes/texts that offer nothing but a frequent desire for re-building and/or re-interpretation.