The sudden walk

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The sudden walk is a story by Franz Kafka that appeared in 1913 as part of the anthology contemplation . It is about an actual or even supposed act of self-liberation.

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From the impersonal “man” perspective, it is less a narrative than a contemplation or reflection that is acted out.

On the one hand, it is about the real course of an evening: the narrator abruptly leaves his family circle, although his departure may seem strange. Because everything was already geared towards lingering at home in the evening, when the narrator felt "a sudden discomfort". He tears himself free and goes into the night city. On the street he feels uplifted and strengthened by his decision. The family "swings into the inanimate" while he rises himself to his "true form". This feeling is reinforced by the fact that he is now visiting a friend.

On the other hand, conditions like mountains build up in front of the narrator, so that there is probably only a dream of breaking out of everyday routine. Because every additional “if” in the seemingly endless chain reduces the probability of what is conditionally possible. In addition, the whole thing - if it actually takes place at all - only leads to a visit to a friend in one evening and not to a real detachment from the family.

Language style and form

The narrative prose sketch consists of two very different sentences. The first sentence takes up an entire book page. It begins with nine consecutive conditional half-clauses ("if [...], if [...], if [...], if [...] and if [...]"), which are more than half take up the narrative time before the “redeeming”, long-awaited “then” finally falls. The second movement begins with an inversion ("Reinforcing ..."), which reinforces the emerging sense of liberation through a reasonable purpose.

Through the impersonal and generalizing “one” perspective, the reader is involved and encouraged to play through this internal trial for himself. The reader is in a contradicting situation because of the incorporating “man”, because there is at the same time experiencing emancipation and transferring this act of liberation to oneself.

Interpretative approaches

A typical life situation for Kafka is described here, namely his relationship with his family, in the midst of which he spent most of his life. He suffered from the direct living and housing conditions, as he describes in Big Noise . There, as in a walk , a certain subliminal aggression against the family is expressed. There he felt like a misunderstood outsider and felt spiritually close to his circle of friends, led by Max Brod .

The subject is not a special feature of Kafka. Striving away from the family and finding one's own being is a central theme in life and literature in general. If you interpret the story as a “success story” (the protagonist, unlike the “man from the country” in Before the Law, simply does what he wants), this prose piece is less complex and hardly Kafka-esque . But is he really doing it?

There are seldom "success stories" at Kafka. That and the closeness to the story on the gallery (here, too, the plot begins with a long conditional structure, but this time in the unrealis) should leave a reader puzzled. Just as the unrealis in “Auf der Galerie” is misleading, the indicative in the conditional sentence structure in The Sudden Walk confuses the reader.

reception

“ And finally, the entire clumsy if-then structure with its twisted argumentation appears as an expression of how difficult this self-liberation actually is. Thus, Kafka's text is pervaded by a contradicting structure: Liberation entices with its palpable glory, but in the end it represents' a wishful thinking surrounded by all 'if'. "

- (Schlingmann 1995, 68; after Sudau p. 62)

expenditure

Secondary literature

  • Sabine Eickenrodt: Sudden walk. The departure as a topos of a literary form of movement in Kafka and Walser. In: Hans Richard Brittnacher, Magnus Klaue (editor): Unterwegs. On the poetics of vagabondness in the 20th century. Böhlau-Verlag, Cologne [u. a.] 2008, ISBN 978-3-412-20085-5 , pp. 43ff.
  • Barbara Neymeyr : contemplation. In: Manfred Engel , Bernd Auerochs (Hrsg.): Kafka manual. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 2010, ISBN 978-3-476-02167-0 , pp. 111-126, esp. 119-121.
  • Ralf Sudau: Franz Kafka: Short prose / stories. Klett Verlag, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-12-922637-7 .
  • Gregor Babelotzky: Franz Kafka's “The Sudden Walk” - On the “true figure” of the narrator and his escape into the project , in: SPRACHKUNST. Contributions to literary studies 2017, pp. 33–49.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ralf Sudau Franz Kafka: Short prose / short stories 2007 Klett Verlag ISBN 978-3-12-922637-7 , p. 61
  2. ↑ Ralf Sudau p. 63
  3. ↑ Ralf Sudau p. 59

Web links

Wikisource: The Sudden Walk  - Sources and full texts