Misunderstanding and Miscommunication Theme Analysis

In “The Village Schoolmaster,” the schoolmaster and the narrator are allegedly allies in a common cause: the schoolmaster sets out to prove to the world that a freakishly enormous mole exists, while the narrator vows to prove the schoolmaster’s honesty. But at nearly every stage, this partnership goes awry. From the beginning, the two men have inadequate information—indeed, almost no information—to carry out their missions: neither has even seen this mole, the narrator tries to back up the schoolmaster without reading his pamphlets, and the men never communicate with one another. Throughout the story, the schoolmaster—confused about the narrator’s motives—is convinced that the narrator is out to steal his fame and is therefore hostile toward his attempts to help. Meanwhile, the narrator (who never asks the schoolmaster how he might be useful) undermines and offends the schoolmaster instead of helping. In plaguing his characters with miscommunication and factual ignorance, Kafka draws attention to the power of misunderstanding to isolate people from one another and to impede even the simplest relationships.

The schoolmaster and narrator separately take up their causes with almost no concern for facts. This is the first warning sign that they’re living in separate realities and will therefore find collaboration impossible. The schoolmaster’s eyewitness account of the mole is questionable from the beginning. Early on, Kafka reveals that the schoolmaster has never even seen the mole whose existence he devotes his life to proving. His estimation of the mole’s length (two yards) is an exaggeration, which casts doubt on all his other assertions. Because of this clear credibility issue, the narrator’s task of proving the schoolmaster’s honesty seems immediately doomed. Even worse, just as the schoolmaster tries to prove the existence of a mole he’s never seen, the narrator tries to prove the schoolmaster’s credibility without ever investigating whether the schoolmaster actually is credible. In fact, the narrator writes his pamphlet defending the schoolmaster without having read the schoolmaster’s pamphlet. And when the narrator finally does read the teacher’s pamphlet, he finds that “we actually did not agree on certain important points,” despite the men’s persistent belief that “we had proved our main point, namely, the existence of the mole.” His failure to communicate with the schoolmaster from the start has undermined whatever philanthropic benefit he might have offered.

In addition to both men being unconcerned with clearly establishing fact, they are unfocused and unqualified for the tasks they’ve chosen, which further undermines their credibility. The narrator conducts interviews and claims to have “correlated the evidence,” but readers are never told of the nature of this evidence. Whatever this mystery evidence is, the narrator admits to having collected it “unsystematically.” The narrator—a businessman—repeatedly admits that he has no credentials to qualify his investigations into the schoolmaster’s veracity. He says that his lack of credentials is probably why his inquiries were doomed from the start. Even the men’s published conclusions are unreliable. The teacher is said to spend more time fretting over the narrator’s attempts to help him than composing effective arguments for his own pamphlets. In a review of the narrator’s pamphlet, an academic journal calls its arguments unintelligible, which gives the reader a sense that the wider scientific community considers the men’s pursuits to be amateur and half-baked. And the narrator himself admits that his and the schoolmaster’s writings, even if they were true, would be impossible for average readers to follow—unintelligibility which only added to the public’s confusion surrounding the mole episode.

To these failures of personal knowledge, Kafka adds a rift in the men’s understanding of each other. The two men communicate exceptionally poorly. Although he claims to want to help the schoolmaster, the narrator refuses to contact him at first. The schoolmaster discovers the narrator’s involvement in the mole case only through “intermediaries,” which causes him to become suspicious of the narrator’s intentions. The schoolmaster admits that he initially had had high hopes for the narrator’s success. He had dreamed that, with the support of a businessman from the city, he could have won fame, fortune, and respect. Yet all the while he has deliberately placed “obstacles” (the narrator does not specify what kind) in the narrator’s path. He does so, the reader is told, because he believes the narrator wants to rob him of credit for the mole discovery. In the final passage, the men claim drastically different visions for the fruits of their mole inquiries: the schoolmaster desired fame, riches, and a ceremonial relocation to the big city, while the narrator claims to have wanted to improve the teacher’s sense of self worth by earning him a bit of recognition. The disparity in these vision shows just how different their quests have been all along. It is this distance that causes the narrator to abandon the project altogether and to call it a mistake. The teacher wanted riches and recognition, while the narrator professes a humanitarian desire merely to help the teacher. When the teacher presses him, however, the narrator admits a total ignorance of his real motives. This scene depicts not only isolation between men but fundamental self-ignorance.