The Tunnel (short story)

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The Tunnel is a short story by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, that came out in 1952. The story appears in the book „The Tunnel“ (1964). It belongs to the most important works of Dürrenmatt and is a classic among the surrealistic short stories.

Contents 1 Story 2 Interpretation 3 Trivia 4 Literature

[edit] Story

Protagonist is a 24 years old student, a fat and cigar-smoking loner, mounts his usual train to reach his university, but surprisingly, when the train enters a very small tunnel, this tunnel doesn’t end. It is endless and the train seems to fall into the middle of the earth. The student gets nervous, but the other passengers are calm, because the don’t see (or don’t want to see?) the catastrophe. The student reaches the locomotive, but there is nobody steering – the driver escaped first. But the student meets the train conductor, who stayed on board, because he says about himself, that he’s a man who “ever lived without hope.” The brakes don’t work and the train gets faster and faster, falling into the abyss. Finally, the train falls right vertically down and the falling student lands on the front glass of the still falling locomotive, where he greedy stares into the incoming darkness.

The train conductor asks, what they shall do, but the student answers: “Nothing (...) God let us fall. And now we'll come upon him.”

[edit] Interpretation

The racing train could be interpreted as every life that inescapably approaches a catastrophe (death, the unknown). Terror can be breaking in a life without warning, and the people hide themselves behind banality. The last sentence of the story interprets this terror as will of God, but that doesn’t make terror clearer.

[edit] Trivia

With the beginning of the story, Dürrenmatt parodies Thomas Mann. The first sentence is very long and nested. Furthermore, Dürrenmatts student is in a train and likes cigars – just like the young man The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg).

[edit] Literature

• "Die schönsten Kurzgeschichten aus aller Welt", Band 2, Verlag Das Beste 1976, S.724-733