The dog (Dürrenmatt)
The dog is a short story by Friedrich Dürrenmatt , first published in 1952 in the anthology Die Stadt. Prose I – IV. has been published by Arche Verlag . In contrast to well-known short stories like Der Tunnel or Die Panne , which appeared in the same anthology or at a similar time, it has received little reception.
action
In the story, the protagonist , an unnamed first-person narrator , meets a salvation preacher who preaches regularly in the city, which is also not named. Later, the narrator notices a large, black, wolf-like dog accompanying the preacher.
The protagonist seeks the man regularly in the city based on the seductive connection between him and the animal, but realizes that it is difficult to find him because he talks unplanned in different parts of the city. He therefore decides to follow him to his apartment, which he succeeds after a while. This apartment is located in a "rich district" in a basement room. There he meets the preacher's daughter, who confesses to him that she is afraid of the dog and, beginning that evening, enters into a sexual relationship with the first-person narrator from autumn to spring. She also reports that her father used to be a rich man but then went into the world to preach the truth and that she accompanied him because she knew it was the truth. The dog ran up to them shortly after they moved out and has been with them ever since.
One spring day, the girl visits the protagonist and leaves the basement for the first time in the course of the plot; so far all attempts by the narrator to lure it out of there have been unsuccessful. Without further ado, she asks to kill the dog, because the father is also afraid of him and seems paralyzed. The protagonist already knew that one day the girl would ask for it and had already bought a revolver . Together they rush through the city, which is described here as exceptionally lively. The girl and the storyteller get lost on their way, because he walks too fast for them, but reaches the basement apartment too late and only finds the preacher's mutilated corpse and can see the dog flee through the window.
A three-day search by the narrator, the police and the military is unsuccessful, neither the dog nor the girl can be found. When he gave up on the night of the fourth day and came home, he watched the girl from his window who, with the calm and tamed dog at the side, was walking past his house on the other side of the street.
interpretation
The most prominent symbol is the dog with its terribleness, which is described again and again as horrible, as a “ huge and terrible animal ” and with negative connotations: “ Its eyes were sulfur yellow, and when it opened its huge mouth, I noticed with gray teeth the same color, and its shape was such that I could not compare it to any living being. ".
It is possible that Dürrenmatt deals with his own relationship with dogs in this story, which Goertz describes as " ambivalent " and attributes this to a childhood experience in which Dürrenmatt was attacked and seriously injured by a wolf-like dog that had accompanied him peacefully for a long time.
In the story, according to Goertz, the preacher can be accepted as good and the dog as bad: Evil “tears” the good apart, even across generations, because in the next step the girl must become the victim of the dog. The individual is powerless against this development of good and bad; society just watches this goings-on. Weber sees it symbolized as a city: “ The city - for Dürrenmatt that is the cave system in which the most paradox of existence is real: the loneliness of the crowd. There are screams here; but no answer to that. “This also creates a reference to the city in the title of the anthology in which the story was first published. It is also the city through which the first-person narrator has to rush to save the preacher from the dog and which is also described as evil and threatening by adjectives with negative connotations: “ full of people and wagons that look like under a sea of Blood moved "and" [they hurried through ...] columns of braking automobiles and swaying omnibuses, which were like monsters, with evil, dim eyes ... ". The embodied society in the form of police and military also remains unsuccessful in both the search for good and evil, and is thus indifferent and useless.
Book editions
- The dog. In: The city. Prose I – IV. Arche, Zurich 1952. (First publication, with eight other stories).
- The dog. The tunnel. The breakdown. Stories. Diogenes, Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-257-23061-3 (work edition, volume 21).
literature
- Elisabeth Brock-Sulzer: Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Stations of his work. Arche, Zurich 1960; Diogenes, Zurich 1986, ISBN 3-257-21388-3 , p. 322ff.
- Heinrich Goertz: Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1987; 11. A. ibid. 2006, ISBN 3-499-50380-8 , p. 42f.
- Werner Weber : Poet or Critic? On the prose by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , December 6, 1952.