Amerika (Kafka novel)

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Amerika
Amerika book cover
Author Franz Kafka
Original title (if not in English) Der Verschollene
Country Germany
Language German
Genre(s) Novel
Publisher Kurt Wolff
Released 1927 (orig. German)
Media Type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN NA

Amerika, also known as Der Verschollene or The Man Who Disappeared, was the incomplete first novel of author Franz Kafka, published posthumously in 1927. The novel originally began as a short story titled The Stoker.

Contents

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The first chapter of this novel is a short story titled "The Stoker". For a detailed plot of this chapter click here.

The story describes the bizarre wanderings of a sixteen-year-old European emigrant named Karl Rossmann in the United States, who was forced to go to New York as a punishment for being seduced by a maid. On the ship to America he becomes friends with a stoker who is about to be dismissed from his job. Karl identifies with the stoker and decided to help him; together they go to see the captain of the ship. In a surreal turn of events, Karl's uncle, Senator Jacob, is in a meeting with the captain. Karl doesn't know that Senator Jacob is his uncle, but Mr. Jacob recognizes him and takes him away from the stoker.

Karl stays with his uncle for some time but is later abandoned by him after making a visit to his uncle's friend without his uncle's full approval. Wandering aimlessly, he becomes friends with two drifters named Robinson and Delamarche. They promise to find him a job, but Karl departs from them on bad terms after he's offered a job by a manageress at Hotel Occidental. He works there as a lift-boy but is fired one day after Robinson shows up drunk at his work asking him for money. Robinson, in turn, gets injured after fighting with some of the lift-boys.

Being dismissed, Karl leaves the hotel with Robinson. Once at Robinson's place, a police officer tries to chase him, but he gets away after Delamarche saves him. Delamarche now works for a wealthy lady named Brunelda. He wants to take in Karl as her servant. Karl refuses, but Delamarche physically forces him to stay. He decides to stay but looks for a good opportunity to escape.

One day he sees an advertisement by the Nature Theatre of Oklahhoma looking for employees. The theatre promises to find an employment for everyone and Karl is taken in by this. Karl applies for a job and gets engaged as a "technical worker". He is then sent to Oklahoma by train and is welcomed by the vastness of the valleys.

[edit] Uncertainties

[edit] Title

In conversations Kafka used to refer to this book as his "American novel," later he called it simply The Stoker, after the title of the first chapter, which has appeared seperately in 1913.[1] Kafka's working title was "The Man Who Disappeared" ("Der Verschollene").[2] The title Amerika was chosen by Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, who assembled the uncompleted manuscript and published it after his death.[3]

[edit] Ending

Kafka broke off his work on this novel with unexpected suddenness. It remained unfinished. From what he told his friend and biographer Max Brod the incomplete chapter about the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma (a chapter the beginning of which particularly delighted Kafka, so that he used to read it aloud with great effect) was intended to be the concluding chapter of the work and should end on a note reconciliation. In enigmatic language Kafka used to hint smilingly, that within this "almost limitless" theatre his young hero was going to find again a profession, a stand-by, his freedom, even his old home and his parents, as if by some celestial witchery.[4]

The parts of the narrative immediately preceding this chapter are also incomplete. Two large fragments, describing Karl's service with Brunelda, are extant, but do not fill up the gaps. Only the first six chapters were divided and given titles by Kafka.[5]

[edit] Major themes

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The novel is more explicitly humorous and slightly more realistic (except in the last chapter) than most of Kafka's works, but it shares the same motifs of an oppressive and intangible system putting the protagonist repeatedly in bizarre situations. Specifically, within Amerika, a scorned individual often must plead his innocence in front of remote and mysterious figures of authority.

[edit] Inspiration

Kafka was fond of reading travel books and memoirs. Benjamin Franklin's biography was one of his favorite books, from which he liked reading passages aloud. He also always had a longing for free space and distant lands. But in reality he never travelled farther than France and Upper Italy.[6]

Kafka, at the time, was also reading, or rereading, several novels by Charles Dickens and made the following remarks in his diary: "My intention was, as I now see, to write a Dickens novel, enriched by the sharper lights which I took from our modern times, and by the pallid ones I would have found in my own interior."[7]

[edit] Adaptations

The novel was adapted for the screen as the film Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations) by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet in 1984.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Kafka (1946, 300).
  2. ^ Kafka (1996, xiii).
  3. ^ Kafka (1996, xiii).
  4. ^ Kafka (1946, 301).
  5. ^ Kafka (1946, 301).
  6. ^ Kafka (1946, 300–301).
  7. ^ Kafka (1946, ix–x).

[edit] References

  • Kafka, Franz (1946). Amerika, trans. Edwin Muir. New York: New Directions.
  • Kafka, Franz (1996). Amerika, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Book. ISBN 0-8052-1064-4.

[edit] External links


The Works of Franz Kafka  v • d • e 
Novels: The Metamorphosis ǀ The Trial ǀ The Castle ǀ Amerika

Short Stories : "Description of a Struggle" ǀ "Wedding Preparations in the Country" ǀ "The Judgment" ǀ "In the Penal Colony" ǀ "The Village Schoolmaster (The Giant Mole)" ǀ "Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor" ǀ "The Warden of the Tomb" ǀ "A Country Doctor" ǀ "The Hunter Gracchus" ǀ "The Great Wall of China" ǀ "A Report to an Academy" ǀ "The Refusal" ǀ "A Hunger Artist" ǀ "Investigations of a Dog" ǀ "A Little Woman" ǀ "The Burrow" ǀ "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk"
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