The next village
The next village is a parable-like prose piece by Franz Kafka that only contains a few lines and appeared in the volume Ein Landarzt in 1920 .
content
The narrator quotes his grandfather. This describes life as surprisingly short. He does not understand how a young person can decide to ride to the next village without fear that life is far from being enough.
Text analysis
The narrator steps back completely, he doesn't judge what the grandfather is saying. In his memory, time is crowded together, a phenomenon that old people usually report and thus indicate a certain uncertainty in the direction of the end of life.
It is a sketch of the subjectively distorted experience of space and time that is peculiar to dreams. The parable reads like a parable on Einstein's theory of relativity , according to which the categories of space and time remain tied to the external parameters and are not fixed quantities.
The relativization of space and time is characteristic of many Kafka pieces. Examples include An Imperial Message , Before the Law , A Report for an Academy , Little Fable, or An Everyday Confusion .
reception
v. Jagow / Andriga (p. 331): “The measurable period of time is canceled, millennia or a whole life and never coincide, as it were, and even infinite time instantly dissolves into nothing. Eternity and moment touch each other in the suspension. "
expenditure
- Franz Kafka: All the stories. Paul Raabe Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1970, ISBN 3-596-21078-X .
- Franz Kafka: The stories. Published by Roger Herms, original version Fischer Verlag 1997, ISBN 3-596-13270-3 .
- Franz Kafka: Prints during his lifetime. Edited by Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch and Gerhard Neumann . Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 2002, p. 280.
Secondary literature
- Peter-André Alt : Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography. Verlag CH Beck, 2005. ISBN 3-406-53441-4 .
- Bettina von Jagow and Oliver Jahraus : Kafka Handbook Life-Work-Effect. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008, ISBN 978-3-525-20852-6 .
- Reiner Stach : Kafka: The years of knowledge. S. Fischer, ISBN 978-3-10-075119-5 .
- Joachim Unseld : Franz Kafka. A writer's life. Joachim Unseld Carl Hanser Verlag, 1982, ISBN 3-446-13568-5 Ln.
Individual evidence
Web links
Example interpretation [1]
