Obsession and Desire Theme Analysis

Although Franz Kafka’s short story “The Village Schoolmaster” is often subtitled “The Giant Mole,” the titular oversized mole, whose appearance briefly catches the attention of a small village, never actually appears in the story. Instead Kafka focuses on a provincial schoolmaster’s mission to prove the existence of the abnormal creature—and the narrator’s deepening obsession with proving the schoolmaster’s credibility. As both men spiral into obsession over the mole episode—an episode that the villagers have already forgotten—Kafka gradually indicates that neither man cares much about the mole at all; the teacher obsesses over his own hopes and dreams, while the narrator’s object of obsession is left ambiguous. In artfully swapping the mole for messy psychological motives, Kafka suggests that the desires fueling obsession are never as straightforward as they seem.

While the story, at first, seems to revolve around the mole, Kafka indicates that the animal itself is less important than the psychological drama it inspires. One indication that the mole itself isn’t very important is the speed with which everyone else in the small village forgets the whole episode. This suggests that the mole might be justifiably forgettable, and it makes the schoolmaster seem odd and eccentric for clinging to the story. Furthermore, as the story progresses, Kafka reduces the mole’s importance by suggesting that the schoolmaster’s obsession isn’t actually about the mole. The story ends in an argument between teacher and narrator, in which the schoolmaster reveals his elaborate vision of becoming wealthy and famous for his discovery of the mole. The mole itself hardly comes up—it’s clear that the mole was never as important to the schoolmaster as his vision of what writing about the mole might bring. It’s especially clear that the mole is somewhat irrelevant when Kafka reveals that the schoolmaster has never seen the creature firsthand. The mole—ostensibly the object of the schoolmaster’s obsession—might not even exist, which suggests that the mole was always just a vehicle for his unrelated obsessions.

Just as the schoolmaster’s obsession isn’t actually with the mole, Kafka shows that the narrator’s obsession with the schoolmaster is not what it seems. Near the beginning of the story, the narrator describes a scholar cruelly dismissing the schoolmaster’s claim about the giant mole. This episode, the narrator says, inspired him to research the giant mole in order to write a defense of the schoolmaster’s credibility. However, the narrator’s obsession with vindicating the schoolmaster is, from the beginning, strange. After all, the narrator seems to find the whole episode unimportant. He calls the schoolmaster “honest but uninfluential,” and he describes the mole episode with belittling language: “trivial,” “small,” “transient,” and even “tiny little.” This suggests that even the narrator himself finds the incident unworthy of attention, which makes his own obsession with it mysterious. Furthermore, while the narrator claims that his goal is to vouch for the schoolmaster’s credibility, he doesn’t bother to read the schoolmaster’s pamphlets—the very claims that need defending—before writing a defense. One would think that reading the pamphlets in question would be the first order of business in defending the schoolmaster’s credibility, so it casts serious doubt on the narrator’s motives that he didn’t read the claims he was ostensibly defending.

Finally, Kafka gives ample evidence that the narrator himself doesn’t understand his mysterious motives, since the narrator is inconsistent in describing what fuels him. At first, the narrator claims that his motive is to defend the “honesty” of the schoolmaster, but then he clarifies that he’s proving the schoolmaster’s “good intentions” (which, of course, is not the same thing as honesty). Next, the narrator writes in his pamphlet that his intention is to give “the schoolmaster’s pamphlet the wide publicity it deserves,” but then he admits that he “was trying to belittle the discovery” of the mole—two statements that are clearly in conflict. Near the end of the story, the narrator he claims to the teacher that “I wanted to help you,” but the teacher rejects this notion and the narrator agrees that it’s “probably” untrue.  When the narrator finally admits near the end of the story that he himself does not know why he tried to defend the schoolmaster’s honesty, it seems to be the first time he’s said something believable about his motives. This calls into question the entirety of his involvement as the reader is invited to go back through the story, searching for any scrap of sincerity in the narrator’s motives.