The result is that his boundless thirst for knowledge has forced him out of his "social circle." The event which set him on this path was his encounter with seven dogs that turned out to be excellent musicians. Looking back on his investigations, the old dog admits he has always asked the most baffling questions rather than trying to adjust to the ways of his fellow dogs.
He, the investigating dog of the story, is not "different from any other dog," and yet he asks if it is possible for a creature to be "more unfortunate still" than he is. This immediate confrontation with the whole universe is a characteristic of the later Kafka and may serve as an indication of his own increasing aloofness from "real life" concerns. Unlike Gregor Samsa in "The Metamorphosis," the animal is not abruptly torn out of a concrete situation and plunged into a conflict with the universal sphere instead, it is encompassed by this sphere from the very outset. © 2012 Wordsworth Editions (E-bok): 9781848705418Like "The Burrow" and "Josephine the Singer," this story deals with an animal that finds itself in a world beyond the empirical one. Kafka’s enigmatic fables deal, often in dark and quirkily humorous terms, with the insoluble dilemmas of a world in which there appears to be no reassurance, no reliable guidance to resolving our existential and emotional uncertainties and anxieties.
Issues of guilt, punishment and penance are also treated with startling brutality in the story set in a tropical penal colony that describes in horrific detail a machine designed to inflict an ingenious and barbaric form of execution on victims of a summary and arbitrary justice – a machine, however, that in this instance destroys not its intended victim, but its zealous operator and, simultaneously, itself.
It conveys with an unsettling mixture of subjective involvement and objective detachment the complex feelings of guilt, affection, responsibility and self-doubt that characterise Kafka’s perception of intimate emotional relationships – themes that are continued in the quasi-fictional story The Judgement and the quasi-autobiographical Letter to his Father. This selection of Kafka’s shorter prose writings includes one of the few works published during his lifetime: the harrowing story of Gregor Samsa’s overnight transformation into a verminous insect, his record of the effect of this sudden metamorphosis on himself and the reaction of his family. Translated, with an introduction, by John R.
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