Kafka's 'The Bucket Rider' - The bare bones of living. Less interested in any panorama, doesn't Franz Kafka very often take one - or in the longer stories a small handful - of the many 'basics' of living amongst others (or less frequently of the existence of a solitary being) and shake it to see what falls out? See A Hunger Artist for the basics of acknowledgement, see The Trial for the basics of guilt, see The Castle for the basics of social acceptance. And read The Bucket Rider for the basics of charity as applied to the individual and not the state.
Kafka's predicament - again the predicament - is the one of a man in a freezing room and without 'a single grain of coal left'. He will 'fly' to the local coal-merchant, a man with a family, a man who has created a business, he will prove incontrovertibly that the stove is 'breathing out cold', and then the obligation will be presented. The obligation of charity. Does society lay this basic obligation on you?
On the validity of these social basics Kafka's authorial voice usually remains silent. The Trial's rules of guilt; The Castle's rules of social acceptance - he writes the protagonist's partisan judgement, but it is clearly that - partisan. The authorial all-knowing voice is written in the neutral matter-of-fact manner. It is the only way to get the humour he wants, and, probably more importantly, the only way to get the casual horror of these situations. Unusually though, the authorial voice within The Bucket Rider does not tend to come across as impartial, though it technically is so, and that is because it is emphatically written in the first-person, the ' I ', format. Perhaps Mr. Kafka in his room was very cold indeed that winter.
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