The Struggle Within
Exploring the Themes and Techniques in Kafka's "Description of a Struggle" (1/2)
Hello once more, dear Kafka aficionados! Today, we will explore “Description of a Struggle” (Beschreibung eines Kampfes, on page 25 of the PDF). This tale represents one of Kafka’s initial and perhaps most perplexing compositions. So, fasten your seatbelts for a rollercoaster ride into the bizarre and dreamlike—excluding the “The Fat Man” section (II, iii sqq.), which I’ll examine in the next post—a quintessential Kafkaesque experience, innit?
“Description of a Struggle” is a significant work in Kafka’s oeuvre. It’s one of his earliest extant pieces and, as mentioned last week, the first one he (reluctantly) shared with his friend and eventual literary executor, Max Brod. Brod was so taken with it that he cited Kafka in a review as a prime example of the elevated standard of contemporary German literature.
Kafka allegedly started writing the story in 1904 (when he was 20) and kept revising it until his literary breakthrough in 1912. Reiner Stach points out that Kafka worked on “Description of a Struggle” more assiduously than on any other of his literary projects: for at least seven, possibly nine years—nearly a decade on this one narrative and just a few other pieces!1 So, if you’re a writer hoping to break through, unsure of the quality of your writing, Kafka has been right there too…
One of the most striking aspects of “Description of a Struggle” is its complicated structure. The story is divided into three chapters, the second being the longest and most complex, including “The Fat Man” embedded tale. The narrative follows an unnamed young man’s surreal encounters with an equally unnamed acquaintance, and later on, a grotesquely fat man carried on a litter, and a supplicant who prays by banging his head against the floor.
Many critics have viewed the story’s disjointed, dreamlike nature as unpolished (which cannot be further from the truth; if anything, it may be over-polished!), incomprehensible, and unworthy of deeper analysis. Even John Updike, in his foreword to The Complete Stories, warns newcomers to Kafka to just skip it, describing it as “repellent” and suggestive of “adolescent posturing”.2
I don’t see it this way. The lack of coherence is precisely what makes the story so compelling. As Stach points out, “Kafka made no attempt to render any emotional connections plausible: kisses, sudden crying, attacks of fear or boredom go unexplained. Kafka wrote in what might be regarded as an antipsychological narrative style”.3 Indeed, the characters behave inexplicably, the scenes appear to unfold within a dream, with abrupt shifts of mood and setting, sudden contradictions, bizarre physicality, accelerations and decelerations, disjointed body parts, abrupt swim-flights, gratuitous depictions of landscape, and so on. The narrative eschews psychological realism and causal logic. Kafka’s tale is, in essence, non-linear, non-realist, experimental, remarkably ahead of its time, foreshadowing the poetic flights of T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s narrative in “A Haunted House”, surrealist prose poems, or even the trippy works of William S. Burroughs.
What strikes me the most is the character’s fleeting intentions and the lack of a clear direction: the narrator desires one thing one moment and its opposite the next (e.g. he wants to stay and to leave, to die and to live). The protagonist appears entirely lost, possibly insane, unsure of who he is and where he’s going. He is the catatonic hero that Gilles Deleuze describes in his hilarious lecture on fictional characters—video in French with Italian subtitles:
At its heart, “Description of a Struggle” could be interpreted as a quest for identity and belonging in a world that fluctuates between threat and seduction, confinement and expansiveness.
The narrative opens with an unnamed protagonist in a nightclub, disengaged from the social situation, seeking solace in a glass of liqueur and a plate of pastries—implying a perplexing preference for solitude and an aversion to crowd dynamics whilst being in a crowded place.
Suddenly, a “new acquaintance” (ein neuer Bekannter, who might represent the narrator’s doppelgänger or a friend’s image—Pollak? Brod, perhaps?) appears, talking enthusiastically about some romantic escapade with a girl named Anna. The narrator, however, finds this revelation “improper”—perhaps indicating his aversion to intimacy or his secret desire to experience what the acquaintance describes.
After that, out of the blue, a maid kisses the acquaintance passionately, and the men’s interaction becomes increasingly erratic: they find themselves wandering aimlessly through the streets of Prague at night, passing street after street, each specifically named—an unprecedented feature in Kafka’s works, where locations are typically anonymous, almost abstract. The tension between the two men intensifies as their relationship veers wildly between intimacy and animosity, attraction and aversion, lust and homicidal impulses...
The protagonist contemplates the various ways to escape the situation, illustrating an internal tug-of-war that might well be the “struggle” alluded to in the title. This inner turmoil, however, also plays out in the recurring themes of transformation and role reversal throughout the text. The narrator and his new acquaintance appear to meld and shift, blurring the distinction between self and other. Metaphorically, it’s as though there are two aspects of a quasi-schizophrenic character in conflict—possibly one yearning to distance himself from society and protect his creative self, the other striving to conform and indulge in the company of lustful women?
The men embark on a ludicrous and almost surreal journey, with the narrator, in a bizarre turn of events, mounting his acquaintance like a jockey riding a horse (remember that drawing?), urging him to gallop through the streets while their dialogue grows increasingly erratic and disjointed, weaving through strange landscapes, unconnected observations and absurd digressions.
Another significant theme in “Description of a Struggle” involves juxtaposing realistic elements—such as forensic physical descriptions—with fantastical, gonzo flights of fancy. The effect is akin to a surreal, feverish dream where, at one point, the narrator envisions himself swimming through the air, manipulating the environment with his mind. Mountains vanish, stars shift positions, and the moon drifts “feebly into the sky as though into troubled waters”.4
Toward the end of the story (ch. III), reaching the Laurenziberg (aka Petřín Hill), the acquaintance finally lets his guard down, revealing his anxieties and doubts about his engagement with Anna. The narrator’s response, “You’ll have to kill yourself”, is both surprising and darkly humorous, hinting, again, at a deep-seated fear of intimacy that mirrors Kafka’s own future struggles in his relationships with women, especially with Felice Bauer (we’ll get there down the line). The story culminates in the acquaintance’s self-inflicted wound with a dagger, a desperate act that ultimately brings him no comfort and seems to prefigure the end of Joseph K. in The Trial.
This motif of the struggle and the knife runs deep in the narrative. One of the most intriguing facets of “Description of a Struggle” is its reflection of Kafka’s own writing struggles. In a diary entry dated November 15, 1910 (by then, he had been labouring on this story on and off for nearly six years!), Kafka records his attempts to revise the story: “I won’t let myself get tired. I will jump into my novella even if it should cut up my face”. This encapsulates the tortuous mental and emotional labour of creation, the complex, often painful process of giving life to one’s art.
I’ll admit, in the context of Kafka’s oeuvre, “Description of a Struggle” is not his most reader-friendly work. Nonetheless, it is a captivating window into the nascent stages of his unique writing style. Even excluding the “Fat Man” segment (which, I promise, we’ll resume discussing in the next post), the story’s disjointed structure and surreal passages evoke a feeling of disquiet and uncertainty. As Stach puts it,
“Description of a Struggle”—that is, the impenetrable entanglement between description and the long-standing struggle for it—would supply the apt words to characterize his vision of life at the time and the literary subject that would fulfill it: the falling and rising, the hovering, dreamy, inane, yet difficult life.’5
So, next, we will delve further into the narrative and dissect the intricate “Fat Man” sequence. But for now, what about you? Do you share Updike’s view that we should pass over this bizarre piece of prose? Or do you feel there is something intriguing in it? Speak up, O faithful readers, and share your thoughts below!
V. Reiner Stach, The Early Years, loc. 5411.
ComStor, p. xii.
Stach, op. cit., loc. 5471.
ComStor, p. 23.
Stach, op. cit., loc. 5423.