Conversation with the prayer

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Conversation with the Prayer is a story by Franz Kafka , which appeared in the magazine Hyperion in 1909 on the initiative of Max Brod and against the intention of Kafka himself. It is also part of the posthumously published description of a fight .

content

The narrator describes how he goes to church to secretly enjoy the sight of a girl without speaking to her. When this fails once, he notices a young man who also comes regularly and prays very theatrically. He urges the insecure prayer to explain his behavior. The reason given by the prayer is that it is his purpose in life to be looked at by people.

As the story progresses, the narrator's interest wanes, but the prayer becomes all the more talkative. He explains his sensitivities, fears and dreams (collapsing houses, dead people lying in the alley, walking across open spaces). The narrator now refers to a beautiful summer scene that the worshiper described earlier. He is very happy about this and praises the narrator.

Text analysis and interpretation approach

The narrator appears as a voyeur , first towards the girl, then also towards the person who is praying. While he never has the thought of approaching the girl, he approaches the person who is praying very imperiously in order to question and reproach him. When, after initial reluctance, he opens his heart wide and talks about himself and his problems, he becomes a nuisance to the narrator. This goes beyond his superficial interest in prayer.

The narrator is presented as unrelated, with no real human involvement. So at the end, after the prayer has released a deep look into his disturbed psyche, he abruptly brings the conversation to an earlier cheerful episode about a beautiful summer experience of the prayer. But the phrase is just right for him. He now praises the narrator, probably precisely because he gets him out of his gloomy mood.

His last sentence reads: "and confessions would be clearest if they were revoked." That should probably apply to all the confessions he has made in the course of history, the negative ones about himself as the positive ones to the narrator. However, since they have not been revoked, they remain unclear and are thus put into perspective again.

Here, too, as in the description of a fight and in a conversation with the drunk, the technique of doubling the narrative figure is used. The first-person narrator is the artist's nature, which includes a voyeur-like interest in peculiarities, but also a defense against too much sociability (i.e. the character of Kafka). But even the thin prayer has strong elements from Kafka with his fears and compulsions, but also the need to present himself. He sees himself as "a misfortune fluctuating on a thin tip"; a typical image that Kafka formulates of himself and that also appears in Der Kübelreiter . The fact that the narrator succeeds in cheering up those who pray could be seen as a form of self-therapy.

Source and web link

Wikisource: Conversation with the Prayer  - Sources and full texts

expenditure

  • Franz Kafka: Prints during his lifetime. Edited by Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch and Gerhard Neumann . Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1996, pp. 387-394.
  • Retained writings and fragments I. Edited by Malcolm Pasley, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 1993, pp. 84–95.

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Unseld p. 27
  2. ↑ Alt p. 151