Kafka's 'My Neighbour' And The Basics Of Communal Living

Amongst other things, Kafka's My Neighbour is another, extremely short, visit to the bare bones of existence surely?

Surely Kafka addressed, one after the other, the bare bones of living as an isolated creature (The Burrow, First Sorrow) and the different basics of living amongst others? My Neighbour fits into the more frequently addressed second group. He's dealt with the need for 'recognition' (Josephine The Singer), with 'personal charity' (The Bucket Rider), with 'guilt' (The Trial), and with other basics. In My Neighbour he deals with the threat of 'theft'.

It's a curious theft for it is the theft of customers. The narrator's business is housed in a building of unavoidably thin walls, and fascinatingly a newcomer, a young man, has snapped up the empty premises next door and listens through the walls to the narrator's phone conversations with customers, and before the receiver has even been hung up, is probably flying through the town to steal the customers.

Of course Franz Kafka uses this predicament to unpack a complicated narrator. This 'theft' is more accurately a probable theft. Hesitancy and anxiety run through the very marrow of this merchant.