Unmasking a pawn catcher

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Unmasking a peasant catcher is a short story by Franz Kafka that appeared in 1913 in the anthology Consideration . The narrator struggles to escape the reach of a tractor.

content

Accompanied by a casual acquaintance, the narrator reaches his evening destination, the house where he is invited to a party. The acquaintance annoyingly forced him to accompany him for a long time. Suddenly he realizes his true nature from this man's special smile, he is a farmer's catcher. The narrator knows this type of person very well and is ashamed that he didn't see through the other person sooner.

A farmer's catcher treats his counterpart with exuberant friendliness, clings to him like a velcro and wants to entice people to engage in activities together, for fun or business. The narrator finally tears himself away from him and storms into the house with the festive hall as if liberated.

Text analysis and interpretation approach

During his visit to Paris with Max Brod in 1911, Kafka became known with people smugglers, the so-called peasant catchers, who lure people into brothels . The peasant catcher is a representative of a half-silk, dark world. He estimates an excess of human care for his dubious, purely business goals.

The narrator does not act decisively towards his unwanted companion. He lets him wander around the city for hours and cannot separate himself, although a party awaits him in a stately home (and not a lonely apartment). He makes several tentative attempts to part with the companion. Even when he suddenly recognizes him as a pawn catcher, he does not use his determined will against him, but instead flees without confrontation. At the very least, recognizing the correct name for his counterpart helps him to make a quick decision.

The relationship with the farmer catchers is ambivalent . The narrator says of them: “I understood them so well, they were my first acquaintances in the city in the little taverns, and I owed them the first glimpse of an intransigence that I couldn't imagine the earth without I was already beginning to feel it in me. ”So the narrator can learn from the pawn catcher at least part of the intransigence that he does not naturally have himself.

The peasant catcher as a representative of profane enjoyment and commercial sexual pleasure personifies the narrator's dark desires and is thus his alter ego . This is why the latter cannot clearly demarcate himself, after all he is a part of himself. Here the doubling of figures reappears, which Kafka z. B. used in the prose piece Description of a fight . However, the narrator does not finally remain in this seductive, but also annoying amalgamation, but finds his way into the festive hall.

Here he differs significantly from the later characters from Kafka's works, who fail to take their fate in their hands if they survive at all. So z. B. in A Country Doctor the protagonist of uncontrollable fantastic horses driven out into the winter night. The monkey Rotpeter from A report for an academy finds no real way out, but only a makeshift, which he describes as a “human way out”.

Web links

Wikisource: Unmasking a Farmer's Catcher  - Sources and full texts

expenditure

  • Franz Kafka: All the stories. Published by Paul Raabe . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg 1970, ISBN 3-596-21078-X .
  • Franz Kafka: Prints during his lifetime. Edited by Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch and Gerhard Neumann . Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-10-038152-1 , pp. 14-17.
  • Franz Kafka: The stories. Edited by Roger Herms. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-596-13270-3 .
  • Franz Kafka: Collected Works. Anaconda Verlag, Cologne 2012, ISBN 978-3-86647-849-7 , pp. 15-16.

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alt p. 257
  2. ↑ sv p. 258
  3. ↑ von Jagow, p. 405