Amerika Read Online Free Page A

the meaning of the surname of the servant who seduces Karl: Brummer (Buzzer), or “noisy fly,” an appropriate, if unsettling, name for her, especially since the
Ross
in Karl’s surname
Rossmann
means “steed” or “horse.” 28
    Readers may well be puzzled by the fascinating but enigmatic last completed chapter. Heightening the enigma is the gap in the novel just before this chapter: after a brief account of Karl’s entrance into a brothel-like institution with an industrial-sounding name, Enterprise Nr. 25, the narrative breaks off, and then without any transition we find ourselves reading a poster in which a mysterious theater advertises its openings. When Kafka finally sat down in 1914 to write this chapter (which Max Brod entitled “The Nature Theater of Oklahoma,” even though it had no title in the manuscript), he may have been attempting to do with
The Missing Person
what he had already done with
The Trial,
namely, first write a final chapter and then try to fill in the missing parts. However, as in the case of
The Trial,
he never did fill in the gaps. So inevitably readers will come away from this chapter, and indeed from the novel as a whole, with divergent interpretations, depending on which level of meaning they choose to emphasize: the social, the meta-physical, the psychological, the apotheosis or parody of the American dream, and so on. 29
    There are two alternative versions of how Kafka wanted to end this never-completed novel. According to Brod, he intended to conclude it in a conciliatory fashion, and he used to hint smilingly that within “this ‘almost limitless’ theatre his young hero was going to find again a profession, some backing, his freedom, even his old home and his parents, as if by some paradisiacal magic.” 30 Perhaps. But on the other hand, in a diary entry of 30 September 1915 Kafka explicitly compared the fates of the heroes in
The Missing Person
and
The Trial:
“Rossmann and K., the innocent and the guilty, both executed without distinction in the end, the innocent one with a gentler hand, more pushed aside than struck down.” 31 Characteristically ambivalent about the kind of ending he wanted, and having worked on the novel on and off for three years, he may at some point have changed his mind about Karl’s fate.
    In the chapter featuring the Theater of Oklahama (Kafka consistently misspelled the name of the state), the “biggest theater in the world” claims that it can take on all who apply. But how credible is the organization? Will it finally allow Karl to reach a degree of fulfillment? Some critics claim that the theater represents a model of religious redemption; others, a social utopia; others still, a surreal version of the American dream. Finally, what are we to make of the decision by Karl, who has lost his identification papers, to identify himself as “Negro,” the nickname he claims was given him in previous positions (which Kafka never got around to describing)? 32 The insertion of the word
negro
into the text was a deliberate act on Kafka’s part, for he had originally written “Leo”—perhaps an allusion to an alter ego, Leopold S., who engages in a transparently autobiographical, if enigmatically fragmentary, dialogue with a character named Felice S. in a diary entry of 15 August 1913—then went back and changed the name nine times to “Negro.” 33 Certain signs indicate a turn for the better—for example, Karl has a couple of promising encounters with figures from his past—that might seem to bear out Kafka’s purported plans for a positive ending. However, a grim image in Holitscher’s travelogue—a photograph depicting a lynching with a group of grinning white bystanders, which Holitscher sarcastically entitled “Idyll aus Oklahama” (Idyll from Oklahama), with the same misspelling as in Kafka—might make one lean toward a darker