Collected Stories Read Online Free Page A

of no single evil act yet accepts his father’s judgment, and so brings his own life and the story to its end. But it is as though the acceptance of that judgment has allowed a new kind of writing to be born.
    Two days later ‘The Stoker’ was written. Karl Rossmann, as the rich long first sentence tells us, has been packed off to America by his parents for having got a serving girl with child, and the ship he is on has now entered New York Harbour. But if America stands – as it has for so many immigrants and writers – for freedom, for the chance to forge one’s own life, one’s own narrative, in the wide open spaces and the bustling cities, then the story promptly turns its back on it. Realizingsuddenly that he has left his umbrella ‘down below’, Karl turns back and, descending into the bowels of the ship, finds, in those constraining corridors and boiler-rooms, the space where Kafka’s narrative can function. From now on Kafka too will turn his back on the temptations of the free-floating novel (whether realist or expressionist) and concentrate on the stokers.
    Yet free-floating narrative will always exert its pull (Kafka does after all go on trying to write an ‘American’ novel), and it is precisely in the tension between the temptation and its refusal, between the letter-writing by the open window and the self-immolation demanded by the tyrannical father, that Kafka will discover the ever renewable springs of his narrative powers.
    Just as the narrative of ‘The Judgment’ emerges in all its power and inevitability out of a redirection of energy that had earlier been spent half combating and half agreeing with the judgments of his family, so the arbitrary bodily movement described in the early letters and taken up in
Meditation
, the arm-jerking and head-twisting and all the rest of it, here gives way to Georg’s rediscovery of his earlier gymnastic ability, once the pride of his parents, now the means of his self-destruction. Two months after writing ‘The Judgment’ and ‘The Stoker’ Kafka completed the greatest of his early works, ‘The Metamorphosis’. As he wakes from uneasy sleep Gregor Samsa finds himself transformed into a gigantic insect and thus having to come to terms with a body he cannot imagine and yet which is indubitably his (or should we say ‘indubitably him’?). Forced to lie on his back, he can only glimpse his domelike brown belly, while ‘his numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes’. This is no erstwhile gymnast; on the contrary, it is someone who has for too long tried to live without listening to his body, which now exacts its terrible revenge.
    The long dense story which follows charts with dreadful precision the way in which Gregor is gradually forced to learn about what Donne, in a very different context, called ‘my new found land’. And, as with Georg Bendemann, understanding arrives for Gregor, and a kind of peace, only with the recognition that he must accede to the wishes of his family, even –perhaps especially – if those wishes concern his own disappearance. And, like the early rape fragment and ‘The Judgment’, this story ends with the world going on its way regardless of the passion of the protagonist. Here, though, this archetypal story of the body has to end with a celebration of the body as, having taken a tram out into the country, the parents gaze fondly at their sole remaining child, the sister Gregor had so wanted to help, ‘And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intentions that at the end of their journey their daughter sprang to her feet first and stretched her young body.’
    In ‘Reading Kafka’ Maurice Blanchot has argued persuasively that that last sentence is in a sense the most terrible in the entire story. At the same time every reader has recognized, however obscurely, that our reactions to this, as to all Kafka’s mature stories, are