Through the Looking Glass
Which explores how Kafka's early 'Contemplation' collection oscillates between detached observation and a yearning for connection, creating a unique narrative style that would define his later works.
In late 1912, just before the seismic creative breakthrough that would produce ‘The Judgment’ and launch his mature period, Franz Kafka published a slim volume titled Betrachtung (aka Meditation or Contemplation, PDF, pp. 404-433).1 The collection gathered eighteen short pieces, most barely longer than a page, written between 1904 and 1912. At first glance, they might seem like mere sketches—fragments really, trial runs on the path to his later works. But these compact texts, hovering somewhere between prose poems and parables, already contain the seeds of Kafka’s singular literary voice.
As we’ve seen previously, the stories in Contemplation emerged during a period of intense artistic searching: Kafka was unsure of his footing, even though he’d already produced a few unpublished texts, like the sprawling, fragmented ‘Description of a Struggle’ and ‘Wedding Preparations in the Country.’ But what makes these early pieces fascinating is how they capture Kafka’s distinctive narrative themes and techniques taking shape in miniature. These stories consistently position themselves at the intersection of two opposing impulses: the urge toward careful, almost clinical observation, and an equally powerful yearning for complete immersion in life experience. The subjects (in most cases a simple pronoun: I, you, he or one) frequently oscillate between feeling utterly isolated from the world they describe and being suddenly, overwhelmingly drawn, carried away into it.
This tension is perhaps most clearly displayed in ‘On the Tram,’ (PDF, p. 419) a story I personally love, that deserves close attention. Here, Kafka crafts a densely packed narrative that begins with a declaration of complete alienation: ‘I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family.’ The narrator can’t even justify his presence on the tram itself. But this state of radical disconnection is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a young woman, described with an almost obsessive attention to detail.
The transformation that occurs in ‘On the Tram’ is remarkable. Our narrator, who begins in a state of existential uncertainty, suddenly discovers a kind of anchoring in the minute observation of that woman. The shift in prose style mirrors this psychological movement. From the abstract questioning of the opening, we move to precise, almost photographic detail: ‘She is dressed in black, the pleats of her skirt hang almost still, her blouse is tight and has a collar of white fine-meshed lace... Her face is brown, her nose, slightly pinched at the sides, has a broad round tip.’
This attention to detail (that we’ve already encountered in the diary entries, cf. descriptions of the actress Mania Tschissik) reaches its climax in the famous description of the girl’s ear: ‘Her small ear is close-set, but since I am near her I can see the whole ridge of the whorl of her right ear and the shadow at the root of it.’ The descriptive movement works like a zoom-in to an extreme close-up, and the ear thus becomes a kind of vortex, drawing both narrator and reader into its intimate geography. It’s as specific as a medical diagram yet somehow deeply unsettling in its intensity.
The parallel with Baudelaire’s poem ‘To a Passerby’ (À une passante, in Les Fleurs du mal) is illuminating here, highlighting what makes Kafka’s approach unique. Both texts deal with a man observing a woman in a public space—granted, both Kafka and Baudelaire are potential creeps... Nevertheless, both display this gradual focus on revealing details of the woman’s body: the ear in Kafka, the eye in Baudelaire, ‘her eye, livid sky where the hurricane is born’. But while Baudelaire’s speaker bathes his encounter in romantic sublimity and the poem ends with a lyrical flourish (‘Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never perhaps!’), Kafka lingers on that ear—peculiar, precise. And where Baudelaire’s narrator dreams of what might have been, Kafka seems almost shocked by what is.
The story concludes with a brief but telling observation: ‘At that point I asked myself: How is it that she is not amazed at herself, that she keeps her lips closed and makes no such remark?’ No poetic flourish here! This final turn inward is quintessentially Kafkaesque. The observer becomes aware of the contrast between the woman’s attitude and his own observation, creating a kind of recursive loop of self-consciousness, moving back to the speaker’s secluded self. This pattern—the movement from isolation to absorption and back to self-conscious reflection—appears throughout Contemplation.
Another example is ‘Excursion into the Mountains’ (a story that was directly plucked from ‘Description of a Struggle’). In this text, Kafka offers perhaps his most explicit exploration of the tension between isolation and immersion. The story begins with a remarkable declaration: ‘I don’t know,’ our narrator cries, ‘I do not know. If nobody comes, then nobody comes.’ What follows is a peculiar fantasy of collective movement, where the narrator imagines an expedition with ‘a pack of nobodies.’ The prose becomes increasingly fluid and energetic: ‘How these nobodies jostle each other, all these lifted arms linked together, these numberless feet treading so close!’
The story starts with solitary uncertainty—foreshadowing the beast’s isolation in ‘The Burrow’ at the other end of Kafka’s literary career—but it ends with an imagined communion that mirrors the pattern we saw in ‘On the Tram.’ With a crucial difference! Here, the yearning for connection manifests not through detailed observation but through a kind of hallucination. The narrator creates his companions out of thin air, out of absence itself. ‘Our throats swell and are free in the mountains! It’s a wonder that we don’t burst into song,’ he notes, adding these details as if to make the fantasy more concrete and uplifting.
Similarly, in ‘The Street Window,’ Kafka presents us with another variation on his theme of isolated observation. ‘Whoever leads a solitary life and yet now and then wants to attach himself somewhere,’ the story begins, setting up the fundamental tension that drives many of these stories. The window becomes both a barrier and a connection point, a threshold between isolation and engagement. The piece ends with characteristic intensity: ‘even then the horses below will draw him down into their train of wagons and tumult, and so at last into the human harmony.’ We’ll encounter a similar plunge into the flow of life (or death?) at the end of ‘The Judgement’—more on that soon.
The influence of photography on Kafka’s narrative technique becomes particularly apparent in a similar story, ‘Absent-minded Window-gazing,’ where a fleeting moment is captured with photographic precision: ‘the sun is already setting, but down below you see it lighting up the face of the little girl who strolls along looking about her, and at the same time you see her eclipsed by the shadow of the man behind overtaking her.’ The interplay of light and shadow, the careful framing of the scene, the focus on a single revelatory moment—all suggest the aesthetic of the snapshot. The final image is exquisite: ‘And then the man has passed by and the little girl’s face is quite bright.’ This also reveals how Kafka developed his characteristic way of handling time, through what we might call a threshold moment—a specific instance when ordinary reality transforms into something else: isolation into oneness, shadow into light.
On the whole, these pieces often read more like prose poems or prose haikus (if that’s even a thing) than conventional narratives. Take ‘The Trees,’ with its stark opening: ‘For we are like tree trunks in the snow.’ In just a few sentences, Kafka creates a parable about appearance and reality, stability and flux. The language is stripped down, almost aphoristic, yet it resonates with philosophical implications. This tendency toward compression and metaphorical density appears throughout the collection, suggesting Kafka’s early recognition that less can indeed be more.
What emerges from these stories is more than just a collection of experimental sketches—it’s a sustained meditation on the act of perception itself. Kafka’s narrators are perpetually caught between two modes of seeing: the analytical gaze that dissects and distances, and the sympathetic vision that dissolves boundaries between observer and observed. This tension creates what we might call the distinctively Kafkaesque perspective, where precise observation paradoxically leads not to clarity but to a kind of vertigo.
Consider how this plays out in the language itself. Kafka’s sentences often begin with concrete observations before turning into increasingly complex subordinate clauses (something that might interest our fellow substacker,
). ‘The Sudden Walk’ offers perhaps the most striking example—almost the entire story unfolds in a single, carefully modulated sentence, like a sequence-shot, that mirrors its protagonist’s gathering momentum: ‘When it looks as if you had made up your mind finally to stay at home for the evening, when you have put on your house jacket and sat down after supper with a light on the table to the piece of work or the game that usually precedes your going to bed...’ The sentence continues to accumulate clauses and conditions, each ‘when’ (wenn) conjunction adding another layer of domestic detail, until the prose itself seems to break free into movement, just as the protagonist breaks free from his evening routine and family entrapment. Similarly, in ‘Bachelor’s Ill Luck,’ what begins as a simple observation about staying single expands into an increasingly complex cascade of implications and consequences, each detail leading to another, creating a kind of syntactic vertigo that mirrors the narrator’s increasing absorption into spiralling anxiety.As I’ve previously mentioned, these narrative techniques are comparable to emerging modernist practices in both literature and visual arts. Just as photographers like Eugène Atget were discovering how careful framing could make the familiar strange, Kafka’s prose transforms ordinary scenes through intense focus. His narrator’s obsessive attention to detail doesn’t clarify reality or reveal deeper truths; rather, it uncovers its underlying strangeness.
The influence of psychoanalysis is equally apparent, though Kafka transforms it for his own purposes. Like Freud’s patients free-associating on the couch, his narrators often begin with surface observations before diving into unexpected psychological depths. However, where psychoanalysis promises to make the unconscious conscious, Kafka’s stories suggest that close observation leads only to deeper puzzlement. The girl’s ear in ‘On the Tram’ becomes more enigmatic, not less, the more precisely it’s described.
The ultimate irony of Contemplation lies in its title. These pieces aren’t really contemplations or meditations in any conventional sense—they’re more like experiments in the limits of contemplation itself. Each story seems to ask: What happens when we look too closely? What occurs when observation becomes so intense it threatens to dissolve both observer and observed?
This dynamic is perfectly captured in ‘Unhappiness,’ one of the longest pieces, where the narrator’s intense self-scrutiny summons an apparition: ‘When it was becoming unbearable—once toward evening in November—and I ran along the narrow strip of carpet in my room as on a racetrack, shrank from the sight of the lit-up street, then turning to the interior of the room found a new goal in the depths of the looking glass and screamed aloud...’ Like the window earlier, the mirror serves as both opening and barrier, much like Kafka’s prose itself—technically transparent yet somehow always calling attention to its own surface. Note that these window and mirror motifs all seem to hark back to Kafka’s early traumatic experience on the pavlatche.
Looking back across the collection, we can see how these early pieces anticipate Kafka’s mature work. The careful balance between realism and abstraction, the precision that paradoxically produces uncertainty, the narrative voice that’s simultaneously intimate and detached—all these would become hallmarks of his later style. But in Contemplation, we catch these techniques in their nascent form, before they’ve hardened into a distinct artistic gesture.
What makes these stories particularly valuable is how they reveal Kafka working out his fundamental artistic problems. How can writing capture the immediacy of experience while maintaining analytical distance? How can prose be both precise and dreamlike? How can narrative perspective be simultaneously inside and outside its subject? Through these deceptively simple pieces, Kafka captures both the precision of photography and the ambiguity of dreams, both the clarity of analysis and the mystery of immediate experience.
In the end, Contemplation offers us something rare: these pieces show Kafka learning to transform his peculiar way of seeing the world into a distinctive literary style. They remind us that Kafka’s famous ‘breakthrough’ night of September 22, 1912, when he wrote ‘The Judgment’ in a single sitting, was preceded by years of careful experimentation and refinement.
While you’re here, you might wish to check out
’s terrific essay on another collection of Kafka’s short pieces: All the World’s a Cage.ComStor, Schocken paperback, W. & E. Muir’s trans., from ‘Children on a Country Road’ (p. 379) to ‘Resolutions’ (p. 398).
Excellent and insightful essay!