The sole fruit of the protagonists’ labors is the publication of their two separate pamphlets about the mole. These pamphlets are the means through which the narrator and schoolmaster attempt to communicate with the public, to prove the existence of the mole and garner support for their endeavors. And as the men grow increasingly attached to the case of the mole, Kafka uses their pamphlets to represent something of each man’s personal identity and desires. Yet these publications go largely unread, ignored or derided by their intended audiences. The pamphlets, then, could also be seen as representing the failure of either man to communicate—with the world at large, and with each other.
When he first gets involved in the mole case, the narrator professes what he insists is an unbiased and impersonal desire to help defend the schoolmaster from afar; to be sure of this, he even refuses to read the schoolmaster’s pamphlet. This avoidance of the schoolmaster’s pamphlet symbolizes a personal distance between the men that will play out with more dramatic consequences later on, when compounded misunderstandings prevent their ability to communicate or work together effectively. In a way, the narrator fails to help the schoolmaster because he doesn’t listen to him, just as the rest of the world seemingly has no interest in listening to either man.
Further, after the narrator has invested years and unspoken amounts of effort, an agricultural journal confuses his pamphlet for the schoolmaster’s; the narrator calls the journal’s error “an unpardonable confusion of identity.” This confusion wounds the narrator so deeply that he recalls all copies of his pamphlet “for purely personal and therefore very urgent grounds,” a revocation that symbolizes his personal withdrawal from the mole affair. By the final scene, in which the narrator can no longer pin down his motives for getting involved and wants to cut ties with the schoolmaster, he has piled up these remaining copies of the pamphlet on his table: an image that suggests the sum total of his personal involvement. The pamphlets, then, can ultimately be seen as a testament not only to the difficulty of meaningful communication, but also to thwarted ambition, dreams, and desires.
The Pamphlets Quotes in The Village Schoolmaster
His little pamphlet was printed, and a good many copies were sold to visitors to the village about that time; it also received some public recognition, but the teacher was wise enough to perceive that his fragmentary labors, in which no one supported him, were basically without value.
“It is the aim of this pamphlet […] to help in giving the schoolmaster’s book the wide publicity it deserves. If I succeed in that, then may my name, which I regard as only transiently and indirectly associated with this question, be blotted from it at once.”
[…] I was often struck by the fact that he showed almost a keener penetration where I was concerned than he had done in his pamphlet.
An unpardonable confusion of identity.
“I do not ask for the return of the pamphlet because I retract in any way the opinions defended there or wish them to be regarded as erroneous or even indemonstrable on any point. My request has purely personal and moreover very urgent grounds; but no conclusion whatever must be drawn from it as regards my attitude to the whole matter.”
The Pamphlets Symbol Timeline in The Village Schoolmaster
