“Description of a Struggle” by Franz Kafka (post 3): Opening of early Kafka story has two characters with identity confusion, a metaphor for multiple personality.

Kafka’s earliest (commonly collected) short story begins “At about midnight,” as a social gathering is coming to an end. The nameless first-person narrator sits alone with schnapps and pastry.

A new acquaintance of the narrator, who wants to share the joy of his amorous encounter earlier that evening, tries to confide in the narrator, who considers it an imposition.

And then, suddenly, the narrator stands up and declares: “All right then, if you insist, I’ll go with you…to climb up the Laurenziberg now, in winter and in the middle of the night…it’s freezing, and as it has been snowing the roads out there are like skating rinks. Well, as you like.”

And then during their walk outside, as relations between the two men become strained, the narrator thinks, “It certainly wasn’t I who had insisted on this walk.” But since it very clearly had been him, why would he now, even in his own private thoughts, disavow it?

Comment

The opening of this story reminds me of Conrad’s “Secret Sharer” in that the protagonist is suddenly confronted by a stranger with whom he has identity confusion. Kafka’s narrator cannot distinguish between himself and his new acquaintance in regard to who wanted to go out walking in the middle of a winter night.

Two characters with identity confusion is a literary metaphor for multiple personality. That the issue is not clearly developed in the rest of this story, reminds me of several works previously discussed in this blog that have multiple personality at the beginning of a story, but forgotten later. One example is Graham Greene’s The Third Man.

In short, this early story by Kafka shows his tendency toward the issue of multiple personality. The story was followed by his “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” which further develops the issue of multiple personality, and which I discussed as a prequel to “The Metamorphosis.”

1. Franz Kafka. The Complete Stories. Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer. Foreword by John Updike. New York, Schocken Books, 1971.