Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Village Schoolmaster, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Obsession and Desire
Misunderstanding and Miscommunication
The Futility of Pride and Ambition
Summary
Analysis
The story’s narrator reports that, several years back, in an undisclosed village inaccessible by train from the nearest town, a giant mole inexplicably appeared one day. It is big enough to become a noted local curiosity, and its appearance briefly garners the village some degree of fame; it even attracts some interest from out-of-town visitors. In time, this fame passes, however, as most people aren’t curious about the mole and forget about it without ever bothering to try to explain its size or presence.
It is important to note that Kafka introduces the mole—the story’s central symbol—many years after its appearance and in the voice of a narrator who has never seen the creature. Kafka never shows his reader the mole and never describes it directly. In hiding the mole in this way, and in beginning his story long after the mole’s appearance, Kafka immediately shrouds the mole in mystery. He therefore invites the reader to doubt any subsequent account of the mole—an instinct that will only grow for the reader as the story’s two protagonists obsess over the mole’s existence.
Themes
The schoolmaster of the village, however, fixates on the mole. Since there are no written accounts of its appearance, he takes it upon himself to write a pamphlet about the episode, which he sells to tourists. Some years pass without the pamphlet attracting much attention, particularly from the scholarly community. Although the schoolmaster sees that his efforts are “basically without value,” he grows upset at the general lack of interest in his work, accuses the public of ignorance, and redoubles his efforts.
Kafka simultaneously describes the villagers’ waning interest in the mole and the schoolmaster’s insatiable obsession with it. That nobody cares about the schoolmaster’s quest to bring the creature back into relevance leaves him isolated. Notably, this sense of isolation and his awareness that his work isn’t valuable cause the schoolmaster not to abandon his futile work, but to put even more energy into it. This begins to show the absurd, illogical characteristics of obsession.
Themes
One day, the schoolmaster secures a long-awaited appointment with a scholar and leaves his family waiting outside in the snow while the two meet. Pleading that the existence of the mole be taken seriously, the schoolmaster exaggerates the mole’s length to two yards. Still uninterested, the scholar brushes off this plea by attributing the mole’s prodigious size to the richness of the village’s soil.
The schoolmaster’s meeting with the scholar is short and sparsely described, but the scene contains crucial plot points. First, the rare mention of the schoolmaster’s family gives the reader a glimpse of the man’s private life—an aspect of him that remains largely hidden from the story. That they wait shivering in the snow here speaks volumes to the man’s character and the power of his obsession, which causes him to neglect his family. Second, the scholar’s dismissive behavior embodies the reaction to the schoolmaster from the greater scientific community, which is totally uninterested in this provincial curiosity. Finally, Kafka makes a point of noting that the schoolmaster exaggerates the mole’s length to two yards, a blatant lie that undermines the schoolmaster’s credibility, even as he desperately wants to be believed. It's worth noting, too, that the scholar absurdly attributes the mole's size to the soil—a hypothesis so unlikely as to be unscientific. Nobody in this story seems credible, which adds to the mystery of the mole.
Themes
After hearing of the scholar’s coldness to the schoolmaster, the narrator, a businessman in an undisclosed city, becomes angry with the scholar. He sees the rural schoolmaster as an honest man, up against unfair odds in his attempt to gain scientific recognition. So he vows to defend the schoolmaster’s honesty and good intentions. He admits that his efforts also would be “far from sufficient to effect a change,” but, despite this, he starts making “inquiries” in preparation for a pamphlet of his own.
The narrator becoming involved in the mole episode is the story’s crucial juncture: from this point, the plot has less to do with one man’s obsession with a mole and increasingly more to do with the way the two men treat each other as they try—and fail—to collaborate. Significantly, the narrator admits at the outset that he was probably powerless to help the man but that he carried on anyway—the first of many such admissions of futility. This moment echoes the schoolmaster’s reaction to realizing his work is futile: just as the narrator carries on after acknowledging futility, the schoolmaster redoubled his efforts instead of stopping. This moment also signals an important shift in narration; where the reader has so far largely been following a plot about one man and a strange obsession, now the narrator begins to focus on the men’s psychological motives. This tone is a hallmark of Kafka’s narrators and is the defining feature of “The Village Schoolmaster.”
Themes
Get the entire The Village Schoolmaster LitChart as a printable PDF.
The narrator decides that he will not read the schoolmaster’s pamphlet before writing his own. He insists that to do so would unduly complicate his sole interest: the honesty of the schoolmaster, rather than existence of the mole itself. In fact, he will not contact the schoolmaster at all, fearing that to do so would convey a personal bias. He prefers to view his motives as pure and philanthropic.
The credibility of the narrator’s project is immediately undermined here. He claims to want to vindicate the schoolmaster’s honesty, but he does not take the most basic steps to do so: assessing the credibility of the schoolmaster’s pamphlet and then speaking with the schoolmaster himself. That the narrator does neither suggests that his motives might not be as straightforward as he imagines—maybe his interest isn’t simply in the schoolmaster’s honesty—although it’s not suggested what his actual motives might be. This echoes the schoolmaster himself, who (it is later revealed) became obsessed with the mole without actually seeing it. Both men seem to be on quests whose ostensible targets (proving the mole’s size and the schoolmaster’s honesty) are beside the point.
Themes
It does not take long before the schoolmaster hears “through intermediaries” that someone else has become involved in his mole affair. His initial reaction is jealousy, and so he puts “obstacles” in the path of the narrator. The narrator ruminates about why his attempts to help are met with such a hostile response. First, the narrator blames his own “scrupulosity,” thinking that his thoroughness might have threatened to outdo that of the schoolmaster. The narrator has, it turns out, begun to conduct his own investigations into the mole’s original appearance, which the schoolmaster supposedly has already done. Second, after publishing his own pamphlet, the narrator finally reads the schoolmaster’s, and the narrator decides that they disagree about certain “important points.” Third, although he claims in his pamphlet not to want any credit for the discovery of the mole, the narrator admits that his pamphlet’s focus on the mole, rather than solely on the schoolmaster, might hot have seemed as selfless as he had intended.
Here, the narrator tries to understand the schoolmaster’s behavior, and his hypotheses point to the growing complexity of this situation. The narrator’s first guess (that his research was so thorough that it put the schoolmaster to shame) is a bit self-aggrandizing, showing the narrator’s ego. The second hypothesis (that the schoolmaster is upset because the narrator disagrees with him about central aspects of the mole’s appearance) shows the absurdity of the narrator’s claim that he is trying to prove the schoolmaster’s credibility. It appears that the narrator does not actually find the schoolmaster to be credible on this issue, as they disagree about fundamental things. The first two guesses help make sense of the third: the narrator’s ego, combined with the apparent reality that he’s not truly trying to vindicate the schoolmaster, suggest that maybe the narrator has published his pamphlet to aggrandize himself. The narrator is clearly unreliable, since he previously stated that his motives were selfless, but now it’s clear that this isn’t true. This passage also illuminates the character of the schoolmaster. The fact that his immediate response to a well-wisher is to thwart him attests to his immense pride—pride that will prove a fundamental hurdle to collaborating with the narrator.
Themes
In the midst of the narrator’s conjectures about his misunderstanding with the schoolmaster, it becomes clear that the two men have met (though the reader is not told any specifics about when). While the schoolmaster is at first “modest and humble” toward the narrator, the narrator tells the reader several of the schoolmaster’s eventual accusations against him, namely a misunderstanding of the mole’s scientific significance and a desire to steal the schoolmaster’s credit (despite his pamphlet’s "melodramatic" tone and self-effacing desire to be “blotted” from the schoolmaster’s discovery). The schoolmaster sees the pamphlet’s self-effacement to be “double-faced” and shamelessly self-publicizing; because of this view, he decides that the narrator is even worse than his previous enemies, who had confined their disparagement to the spoken, rather than published, word.
Due to the narrator’s piecemeal storytelling, the reader is not told exactly how the two men met. There is no decisive scene where one reaches out to another. All that’s clear is that they have indeed met, and that the miscommunication initiated by the narrator’s avoidance of the schoolmaster’s pamphlet has quickly snowballed into misunderstanding between them. While the narrator tries to explain himself thoroughly, the fact that the schoolmaster so easily rejects the narrator’s avowed selflessness, instead choosing to see in the narrator a greedy desire to steal credit, attests to the uselessness of stating one’s motives and the inevitability of misunderstanding.
Themes
The schoolmaster’s various accusations lead the narrator to ruminate further on the nature of his own motives for trying to help the man, motives which he admits have strayed from pure philanthropy. He concludes that his efforts to bring the mole back into public relevance have become mixed with a desire to “belittle” the whole episode and, thus, to belittle the schoolmaster’s interest in it. The narrator’s tone grows gradually more dismissive, even taking care to note the teacher’s “old wrinkled face.” He explores the schoolmaster’s inordinate obsession with the mole, his “complete unsuccess,” and the excessive “touchiness” that has developed in him as a result.
The narrator’s deep introspection here is classic Kafka. The narrator documents the slow shift in his motives from charity to resentment. This is a clear warning sign to the reader on several fronts. First, it indicates that stated motives in the story (remember, the narrator originally said he wanted to help the schoolmaster) are not really what they seem. Second, this shift in motives suggests that the men’s focus is increasingly less on bringing a credible account of the mole to wider public consciousness than about their mutual antagonism. Further complicating things, while the narrator claims to “belittle” the schoolmaster’s obsession, he himself has become wrapped up in the business of proving the mole’s existence. Clearly he has become personally interested in something he claims to denigrate; this unaddressed contradiction adds to the story’s theme of self-ignorance and reflects the complexity of an obsessive mind.
Themes
At the height of these probing reflections, the narrator describes the resounding apathy with which his pamphlet has been received. The recent issue of an agricultural journal has ridiculed his pamphlet in a brief back-page notice. The narrator quotes this notice, which is so uninterested in his work as to confuse the narrator with the schoolmaster. He calls this “attack” an “unpardonable confusion of identity.” The narrator is hurt by the notice but not coordinated enough with the schoolmaster to fight back concertedly.
An obscure notice in the back pages of an agricultural journal is hardly enough of an “attack” to become personally wounded, but the narrator’s language reveals that this is exactly how he feels when the journal confuses his pamphlet with the schoolmaster’s. This points to the narrator’s personal investment in the pamphlet and his big ego about it, and his reaction also parallels the schoolmaster’s own hurt pride over the world’s indifference to his labors. A “confusion of identity” is how the narrator describes the editors’ mix-up of his publication with the schoolmaster’s, but—as is becoming increasingly clear—the two men have similar character and are on similar quests, so the confusion doesn’t seem as “unpardonable” as the narrator thinks.
Themes
This journal notice effects a change in the narrator, and he begins to doubt whether he can continue. He soon receives word from the schoolmaster that he will visit him over the Christmas holidays. The letter in which the schoolmaster announces his visit is particularly cryptic and bitterly occupied with generalizations about the “malice” of the world. The narrator reluctantly agrees to the visit.
As with the narrator’s interest in something he wishes to belittle, the schoolmaster’s letter shows a deep personal conflict: on one hand, his malicious note seems to lump the narrator alongside the “malice” in the world. This is indeed an insult, and that the narrator quotes the letter for his readers indicates the significance he gives to it. But on the other hand, this insult comes embedded in a desire to spend Christmas with the narrator: a poignant detail that is easily lost in the anger of his missive. Who would leave their family on Christmas? As with the image of the schoolmaster’s family shivering in the snow, this detail speaks volumes for the power of the man’s obsession. Only, this time, it is not the curious mole with which he is obsessed; it is now the narrator. His request to spend Christmas with the narrator, rather than with his family, indicates the total shift in his psychological dependence from the mole to his alleged benefactor/tormentor. This small gesture helps complete Kafka’s message on two fronts: first, that obsession is rarely about the assumed object of fixation, and, second, that an obsessive and prideful person will create his own audience, even when nobody seems interested.
Themes
When the schoolmaster arrives, wearing an “old-fashioned padded overcoat,” he has not only seen the agricultural journal’s dismissive review but is furious about it, exclaiming “Of course I won’t take this lying down!” Fed up, the narrator announces that they must part ways. He tells the schoolmaster that his inordinate obsession with the mole has shut him from the outside world and has rendered useless any attempt to help him. This overly personal involvement, he says, combined with the journal’s clear pronouncement that their cause is useless, have convinced him to cease his involvement with the schoolmaster. Claiming motives of “self-renunciation,” and “beg[ging] your forgiveness,” the narrator breaks things off. He suggests that they have both failed and that to part ways out of “respect” would be in the schoolmaster’s best interest.
This scene, the first of their meetings that Kafka actually describes, illuminates ugliness in both characters. As for the schoolmaster, the fact that he has already seen such an obscure notice suggests the tenacity with which searches for information about himself—a detail that shows dedicated self-absorption. His desire for revenge on the editors is as ridiculous as the narrator’s deep personal offense—a similarity that further unites the two men in their lonely pursuits, despite their imminent parting. As for the narrator, his allegedly selfless reasons for abandoning the project strike the reader as patronizing and insincere, especially when he fixates on denigrating personal details like the schoolmaster’s clothing. (Kafka’s physical descriptions are rare, so details like these are especially significant to the narrator’s growing desire to “belittle” the man.) Lastly, the narrator’s moralizing about the schoolmaster’s unhealthy fixation sound especially hypocritical in light of his injury at the journal’s notice and his own years of wasted obsession.
Themes
A heated argument ensues, in which the schoolmaster reveals the hopes he had harbored for fame, fortune, and comfort for his impoverished family. Speaking with arms outspread, “as if his tiny little wife were standing there and he were speaking to her,” he says that when the narrator originally stepped in to help, this encouraged the schoolmaster and his family to envision unprecedented levels of success: that the narrator’s support would catch on publically, townspeople would agree that the old village schoolmaster might hold an important scientific discovery, the schoolmaster would be “showered” with donations, and he and his family would finally be whisked away to the city in a horse-drawn carriage, where hordes of people would wait to honor him for his intelligence. For the thwarting of these hopes, the schoolmaster blames the narrator.
In the Christmas Day argument at the story’s climax, there are two big reveals. The first of these is the schoolmaster’s revelation of his true motive in studying the mole. The object of his obsession, it turns out, was either all along a constructed fantasy or has at least now turned into one—his aim is less the promotion of a zoological oddity than earning fame and fortune for himself. The animation with which he narrates this fantasy—even gesticulating to his imagined wife—gives readers the sense that his years of unrewarded effort have made him completely delusional. Kafka, however, is ambiguous as to how readers should take this delusional monologue. On one hand, it could be a cautionary tale about the power of a lonely and ambitious mind to construct its own reality; the schoolmaster, after all, seems convinced that these hopes were reasonable. But on the other hand, his motives, insane as they are, are at least discernable, and they seem to come, at least in part, from a desire to help his family. Readers are about to discover that this is more than can be said for the narrator, whose motives in the next phase of this argument seem not only confused but non-existent.
Themes
In the midst of this, the narrator pauses to inform the reader that, in the wake of the journal’s dismissive notice, he quietly orchestrated the return of every copy of his pamphlet. He published a circular requesting the pamphlet’s return, and he sent this circular to everyone to whom he had distributed the publication. Most copies were returned, several respondents had forgotten the pamphlet entirely (this pleases the narrator), and only one person requested to keep the pamphlet as a curiosity, with the promise to keep it hidden for twenty years.
The fact that many of the narrator’s correspondents have forgotten his pamphlet illustrates a total lack of audience for the men’s obsessions. Since Kafka equates the pamphlets with the men’s sense of self, the narrator revoking every copy of the pamphlet signals the end of his personal involvement in the case. Kafka’s decision to include a sole interested reader of the pamphlet is a curious and unresolved one; he might be read as Kafka’s symbolic acknowledgement that no curiosity or obsession, however irrelevant, is wholly without its enthusiast—a small reminder of the mind’s susceptibility to pet interests, the kind of susceptibility that started this business in the first place. Even in this view, Kafka quashes any suggestion of any meaningful engagement with the question of the mole, though, since the reader seems more amused than interested.
Themes
The narrator meets the schoolmaster’s monologue about his thwarted fantasy with a speech of his own, in which he rebukes the schoolmaster for blaming him and for misunderstanding the reward of scientific discoveries. To humor the schoolmaster, the narrator offers a different hypothetical scenario, in which a scholar and his graduate student might investigate the schoolmaster’s claims, the schoolmaster might be recognized publically with a university scholarship, his status in the village might be elevated a bit, he might earn some money and a medal, and a small museum might be built on the site of the mole’s appearance. Above all, the narrator scolds the schoolmaster’s misunderstanding of fame and credit: he insists that, even if recognized briefly, the discovery of the mole would soon be absorbed into the wider scientific community, other scholars would add to and alter his findings, and, in the process, the mole would cease to be the schoolmaster’s sole property.
The narrator’s rebuke to the schoolmaster confirms what the reader has been coming to terms with all along: that the men have all along had immensely different goals for their involvement in the mole episode. The narrator’s fiery response makes the reader aware of just how isolated the schoolmaster has become. To illustrate the schoolmaster’s delusion, the narrator invents a parallel hypothetical scenario about the schoolmaster’s success. That the narrator stoops to the same kind of psychological invention that the schoolmaster did suggests that the narrator, the alleged voice of reason, is also able to fabricate detailed psychological realities and that he uses much of the same deluded logic and ungrounded hypotheticals that characterize the schoolmaster’s thinking. Once again, the two men do not seem so different from one another.
Themes
After the narrator’s exasperated monologue, in which he stands by his original desire to help the schoolmaster, the schoolmaster questions this motive point-blank. He asks the narrator if he truly wanted to help when he decided to get involved, and if he still wants this now. After a pause, the narrator admits that he no longer knows if that was his motive—then or now. The argument subsides, and the narrator considers his desire to banish the schoolmaster from his home. He even gives him money (something he admits to having done before), hoping the schoolmaster will leave on his own accord. But as the schoolmaster sits smoking his pipe in silence, the narrator can’t bring himself to ask him to leave.
The tone of the narrator’s diatribe has been fairly moralizing, but the climax’s twist—that the narrator’s motives aren’t clear and can’t really be considered altruistic—makes this moralizing tone retrospectively ring hollow. Just as Kafka reveals to the reader the extent of the schoolmaster’s delusion, Kafka suggests that the narrator himself has very little self-knowledge and was deluding himself about his own motivations this whole time. His ignorance of his own motives in this final scene undermines the whole idea of charity in the story: both of these men appeared initially to have good intentions (to spread scientific knowledge and help a mistreated schoolmaster), but in the end, neither had straightforward altruistic motives. Kafka leaves unresolved whether genuine altruism is possible—it may be impossible to know, since self-examination is shown to be almost impossible, too. In other words, it seems that nobody really knows their own motives, so it’s unclear if anyone is ever being altruistic or whether all motives are essentially selfish. The story’s final moment, in which the embittered narrator cannot dismiss the schoolmaster, suggests that the men have grown paradoxically dependent on one another. Despite their bitter differences, they are the only ones who understand each other’s obsessions, and so they’ve found a kind of companionship that substitutes for the public audience they initially desired.
Themes
