Read Amerika for Free Online Page A

cannot resist the temptation to call them ‘my poor parents’) were delighted with the festivities.” See Hartmut Binder,
Kafka-Kommentar
(Munich, 1982), p. 85.
Return to text.
    36. Although Karl Rossmann is interviewed at what seems like a hiring fair, Kafka never once uses the word
einstellen
(to hire). Instead, in the course of this short chapter he uses the word
aufnehmen
or variants thereof—i.e., “to be admitted or received”—some thirty times.
Return to text.
    37. Kafka’s German biographer Reiner Stach adds that Kafka’s prose in
The Missing Person
“makes both things and people emerge in exaggeratedly sharp contours, as though seen under neon light.” This seems just about right. See Stach,
Kafka: The Decisive Years,
trans. Shelley Frisch (New York, 2005), pp. 117–18.
Return to text.
    38. Nicholas Murray,
Kafka: A Biography
(New Haven, Conn., 2004), p. 224.
Return to text.
    39. For instance, the Prague-born critic Heinz Politzer praised the first sentence in the original German for its controlled and “intricately patterned periods” but censured the second as “artless, not quite coherent, and inconclusive.” Politzer,
Parable,
p. 123. However, indicting Kafka for being inconclusive surely amounts to condemning Kafka for being Kafka. Besides, modern writers such as Joyce and Beckett have taught us to appreciate the way Kafka can slip into the consciousness of Karl Rossmann without inserting the kind of transitions one would expect in a nineteenth-century novel.
Return to text.
    40. To the novelist Robert Musil, who linked Kafka and the Swiss writer Robert Walser in an early review of “The Stoker” and
Meditation (Betrachtung),
Karl Rossmann evokes a “feeling of excited children’s prayers and something of the uneasy zeal of carefully-done school exercises and much which one can only describe with the phrase moral delicacy.” See
Kafka: Kritik und Rezeption,
p. 35.
Return to text.

Amerika:
The Missing Person

I
    THE STOKER
    _______________
    A s he entered New York Harbor on the now slow-moving ship, Karl Rossmann, a seventeen-year-old youth who had been sent to America by his poor parents because a servant girl had seduced him and borne a child by him, saw the Statue of Liberty, which he had been observing for some time, as if in a sudden burst of sunlight. The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds.
    â€œSo high,” he said to himself, and although he still had no thoughts of leaving, he found himself being pushed gradually toward the rail by an ever-swelling throng of porters.
    In passing a young man whom he knew from the voyage said: “So you don’t feel like getting off yet?” “Oh, I’m ready all right,” said Karl with a laugh, and in his exuberance, sturdy lad that he was, he lifted his trunk up on his shoulders. But looking out over his acquaintance, who swung his walking stick several times as he set off with the other passengers, he realized that he had forgotten his umbrella below deck. Quickly he asked his acquaintance, who seemed not at all pleased, whether he would be so kind as to wait there for a moment with his trunk, surveyed the scene quickly so he could find his bearings on his return, and hurried off. Downstairs he was disappointed to find a passageway that would have certainly shortened his path blocked off for the first time, probably on account of all those disembarking passengers, and was obliged to make his way laboriously through numerous small rooms, corridors that constantly turned off, many short stairs in rapid succession and an empty room with an abandoned desk, until at last, having gone that way only once or twice and always in company, he had quite lost his way. In his uncertainty, not encountering a soul and hearing only the constant scraping of a thousand human feet above him, and from a distance like a last gasp the final