Preface: These are my teaching notes for Kafka’s ‘The Burrow,’ which I often assign in my literature seminar ‘Other Minds: Writing Nonhuman Consciousness.’ The seminar includes units on animals, insects, plants, aliens, and AI. We read Kafka’s story in a unit on burrowing creatures, alongside essays about badgers, bears, and weasels. My notes are less a lecture than a roadmap for discussion, an itinerary of the passages that I hope to draw attention to and admire in class. I don’t generally write my notes with publication in mind—they’re rough, provisional—but I’m happy to share my burrow-thoughts with the readers of FRANZ.
The Burrow
“The Burrow” is narrated by a nervous, anxious, badger-like animal who is vain about his subterranean castle but terrified about his vulnerability there, always beset by imaginary enemies. What if a robber burrows into his house by accident and plunders his food stores? What if a predator discovers the entrance and devours him? In a sustained, 30-page monologue, the narrator weighs the cost and benefit of every modification he has made to his burrow, considering the advantages of each fortification or entrance or wall, only to concede—in the very next clause—the incredible dangers of that same fortification or entrance or wall. Every aspect of the architecture is examined from every angle. Every worst-case scenario is simulated. Filled with hyper-rational vocabulary—the narrator conducts ‘experiments,’ ‘calculates,’ entertains ‘hypotheses,’ etc.—the story reads like a critique of paranoid reason. The narrator is often literally paralyzed with indecision, frozen at the burrow entrance or in a hall, unable to decide on the next best course of action because he is caught in the bear trap of self-consciousness.
In terms of plot, not much happens. The story is broken into three acts, each roughly ten pages long: in the first act, the narrator takes us on a tour of the burrow; in the second, he sets out above ground for food; and in the third, he returns to the safety of underground, only to hear a mysterious whistling noise, which he proceeds to investigate. Dismissing the whistling at first as the result of ‘small fry’—tiny vermin whose own narrow tunnels create passages for air flow—he soon reasons himself into a state of abject fear, a downward spiral of catastrophizing. Because what if it’s not small fry after all? What if it’s one single massive opponent he hears, burrowing toward him with furious speed and whistling as it works? The narrator has a flashback to the early days of building his burrow. Then, too, he had heard another creature burrowing distantly in the dirt, and he had paused to listen. And here, toward the very end of the story, the narrator offers a startling confession:
I could clearly recognize that the noise came from some kind of burrowing similar to my own…Perhaps I am in someone else’s burrow, I thought to myself, and now the owner is boring his way toward me…I would have gone away, for I have never had any desire for conquest or bloodshed, and begun building somewhere else. But after all I was still young and still without a burrow, so I could remain quite cool…For a long time I went on listening for him in the silence, before I returned once more to my work. Now that warning was definite enough, but I soon forgot it, and it scarcely influenced my building plans.
Now the narrator’s neurotic insecurity and possessive jealousy can be seen in a new light. His burrow—of which he is so vain, over which he has been preening and worrying for thirty pages—isn’t even ‘his’ burrow. He stole it. His original sin was a kind of colonialism, then, a mustelid manifest destiny. He had squatted in another burrower’s burrow, taken its land, and at the time the original ‘owner’ had simply turned tail, digging in the opposite direction. To the extent the narrator has tried to forget this episode (‘I soon forgot it’), this is also a story about the return of the repressed: just as he has dug a physical burrow to hide from his enemies, he has made his mind into a mental burrow to hide from this memory. But has the burrow’s original owner, after all these years, come back? After that early warning, has it returned to see what defenses the narrator has made in the meantime, and to punish him for his trespasses? The narrator laments how frivolously he has wasted this time, vividly imagining his death in the destroyer’s jaws. If it has jaws, that is. If it even exists. Because the identity of the opponent has come into focus for the reader: whether or not there is a real creature, it is also clearly the ghost of the narrator’s guilt—his bad conscience over the stolen burrow—that has been haunting him and hunting him, projected outward as a paranoid whistling.
This is not the first time, we realize, that the narrator has projected his repressed guilt outward in this way, attributing it to a hypothetical burrower, a double of himself. In an earlier passage, he had imagined the various creatures that might stumble across his burrow’s entrance, and it is easy, in retrospect, to appreciate how this doom fantasy quickly degenerates into a self-portrait:
It need not be any particular enemy that is provoked to pursue me, it may very well be some chance innocent little creature…which follows me out of curiosity, and thus…becomes the leader of all the world against me…it may be—and this would be just as bad, indeed in some respects worse—it may be someone of my own kind, a connoisseur and prizer of burrows, a hermit, a lover of peace, but all the same a filthy scoundrel who wishes to be housed where he has not built.
The narrator’s worst-case scenario is not an ‘innocent’ other but ‘someone of my own kind’ (the phrase even anticipates his description of the owner’s digging: ‘some kind of burrowing similar to my own’). And it is ‘of his kind’ down to the last detail: like him, it is not just a burrower but a borrower. The ‘filthy scoundrel’s most shameful trespass—‘to be housed where he has not built’—echoes the narrator’s original sin. He hasn’t confessed as much yet, but at the climax we’ll learn that he, too, might have stolen this burrow that he did not build, crawling inside both as hermit and as hermit crab, a usurper to the shell. In a very real sense, the ‘particular enemy’ he must protect himself from is himself: the worst fate he can imagine is the one that he has already inflicted; the worst scoundrel that his guilty conscience can conjure—to pursue him, to punish him—is his past self. Even the fabled boogeymen of all burrowers—the legendary ‘creatures of the inner earth,’ who are said to dig up and devour their victims from below—come to seem like displacements of the narrator’s squatting anxiety: ‘Here it is of no avail,’ he thinks, ‘to console yourself with the thought that you are in your own house; far rather are you in theirs.’
In the story’s atmosphere of paranoia, self-punishment, and fear; in its claustrophobic monologuing; but above all in its parody of reason—the way that the mechanisms of reason can be marshaled by unreason; the way that a perfectly logical premise can be pursued ad absurdum, until it terminates in irrational dread—‘The Burrow’ reads like Poe. So too in its sense of sound design, the acousmatic whistling that pursues the narrator all over his labyrinth (like the hideous beating of the telltale heart, the yowling of the black cat, the bangs and scrapes in the house of Usher). According to the narrator, the sound of the whistle never grows louder or softer as he moves, no matter how far he travels from its ostensible source: ‘it is this very uniformity of the noise everywhere that disturbs me most.’ The one ‘hypothesis’ he doesn’t entertain—that he is himself the source of the whistling—is the first to occur to the reader. As Reiner Stach, Kafka’s biographer, puts it, the fact that it doesn’t occur to the narrator does the most to confirm it for us. The whistling in the narrator’s ears is legible as a projection, an outward manifestation of his own guilt, anxiety, and dread. Call it a kind of telltale tinnitus. He is pursuing, and being pursued by, his own terror of pursuit.
It’s inevitable, then, that his pursuer should be another burrower, rather than a wolf or dog or human hunter (a badger’s natural predators): the story’s themes of doubling demand it. The narrator must recognize himself in the mirror of this whistling, and the destroyer that he dreads must be his own doppelganger. The story has been preparing for the arrival of this double from the beginning. At every moment, the narrator’s consciousness has been characterized by its doubleness, by his fantasy of being duplicated. If only there were two of him, he frequently imagines, that would solve all his problems. He could sleep while his doppelganger stands guard over him. At other times he incorporates this principle of doubleness into the very architecture of his burrow, fantasizing a version of it that would have two entrances, or multiple Castle Keeps, rather than one. He even digs a secondary ‘experimental burrow’ from which to keep vigil over the actual burrow (notably, this lookout trench is ‘just as long as myself’: it is a double not only of the burrow but of his body). Hence his architectural motto: ‘It is always a fault to have only one piece of anything.’ Including one burrower, one narrator, one self.
But every time he fantasizes a double to solve the dangers of solitude, he merely ends up duplicating the dangers as well. In the narrator’s phrase, ‘two entrances would double the risk.’ Because what if the second entrance draws attention? What if his security guard wants to come inside the burrow, betraying their location? It is an infinite regression of threats. On one page the narrator will yearn, ‘If only I had someone I could trust to keep watch at my post of observation; then of course I could descend in perfect peace of mind. I would make an agreement with this trusty confederate of mine…With that a clean sweep would be made of all my fears...’ But then, in the very next sentence, this trusty confederate will curdle into a Brutus, unmasked by the narrator’s paranoia as a potential blackmailer: ‘For would he not demand some counter-service from me; would he not at least want to see the burrow?...And what trust can I really put in him?...I can only trust myself and my burrow.’
Again and again, the double meant to protect from danger inevitably introduces a new danger. These double-edged doubles achieve their final form in the doppelganger at the end. For now the narrator truly has divided into a second self, an imaginary badger to embody his own whistling (tellingly, the narrator even experiences this double as doubled: when he notes that the whistling never grows fainter, he briefly wonders whether in fact ‘there are two noises,’ emanating from ‘two centers’). Except this double is not coming to keep guard over the narrator: he is coming to eat him. He is the incarnation of the danger itself.
This entire dynamic of the narrator’s consciousness is condensed in the opening paragraph. The story begins at the very moment the burrow has come to an end: ‘I have completed the construction of my burrow,’ the narrator claims, ‘and it seems to be successful.’ Even on first read, we can understand that we are dealing with a neurotic—if not unreliable—narrator: he may think he has ‘completed’ the burrow, but we sense that the burrow must remain unfinished, indeed unfinishable, since it only ‘seems’ successful. The narrator will always have more work to do, new dangers to protect himself from, as the rest of the paragraph makes clear:
All that can be seen from outside is a big hole; that, however, really leads nowhere; if you take a few steps you strike against natural firm rock. I can make no boast of having contrived this ruse intentionally; it is simply the remains of one of my many abortive building attempts…True, some ruses are so subtle that they defeat themselves, I know that better than anyone, and it is certainly a risk to draw attention by this hole to the fact that there may be something in the vicinity worth inquiring into. But you do not know me if you think I am afraid, or that I built my burrow out of fear. At a distance of some thousand paces from this hole lies, covered by a movable layer of moss, the real entrance to the burrow; it is secured as safely as anything in this world can be secured; yet someone could step on the moss or break through it, and then my burrow would lie open, and anybody who liked—please note, however, that quite uncommon abilities would also be required—could make his way in and destroy everything for good…at that one point in the dark moss I am vulnerable, and in my dreams I often see a greedy muzzle sniffing around it persistently. It will be objected that I could quite well have filled in the entrance too, with a thin layer of hard earth and with loose soil…But that plan is impossible; prudence itself demands that I should have a way of leaving at a moment’s notice...
From the very first lines, we know that ‘The Burrow’ will be a story about doubles. On the one hand, we open with a physical duality: there is the false entrance and the real entrance. On the other hand, this physical duality merely externalizes the narrator’s psychological duality, the double-edgedness of safety versus threat, ruse versus risk: the false hole that distracts predators from the real entrance also attracts them to the vicinity in the first place. This doubling likewise manifests in the narrator’s syntax, which is constantly self-qualifying and self-interrupting, doubling back on itself to correct or refine each thought: ‘The hole is a ruse. But I didn’t build it as a ruse. But some ruses are risky. But I am not afraid, because the mossy entrance is as secure as a bank vault. But someone could always step on it. And then anybody—but not anybody: they’d have to be some kind of master cat burglar—could make his way in. But I could simply cover the entrance with soil. But that is impossible.’ As the narrator digs his way through these contradictions—tunneling an em-dash passageway here, packing semicolons together there—the reader begins to sense the organizing principle of the story’s form: this monologue is the burrow. The narrator is complicating and convoluting his monologue for the same reasons he modifies his lair: to secure it. In this respect, all of the narrator’s corrections read like castellations, with each thought fortified by its counter-thought, each sentence buttressed by its double (it is always a fault to have only one piece of anything). And like the predator sniffing between two entrances, the reader is meant to be baffled by every turn, left to decide which is the real sentence and which is the decoy.
Finally, the narrator’s commitment to doubleness in this passage is personified by a literal double, that ‘greedy muzzle’ he sees sniffing at the mossy entrance in his dreams. This imaginary doppelganger is itself a kind of ruse or red herring, an inversion of the doppelganger we’ll meet at the climax, who enters the burrow not from above (through the mossy entrance) but from the sides (by burrowing through the dirt). So the story foreshadows this eventual antagonist while also distracting us from it: like the hole in the ground, this ‘greedy muzzle’ is a diversion, a false double, drawing the reader’s attention away from the real double to come.
The logic of this opening passage—and of the entire story—follows the logic of the narrator’s consciousness. If that logic can be boiled down to a single paradox, it is probably this one: safety produces danger, namely, the danger of the loss of safety. After building a labyrinthine burrow to protect himself, the narrator is doomed to protect the burrow. He will have to stand guard outside the burrow (or outside the Castle Keep), watching over it to protect it from enemies. What the narrator never realizes is that he is himself the only enemy within the burrow, the source of all the dangers he fears: both figuratively (it is his own anxiety, guilt, and paranoia that he is hiding from) and literally (it is his own whistling that haunts him in the halls).
In his biography, Reiner Stach provides three possible origin stories for this story:
1) Historical: during World War 1, Prague put on ‘war displays’ as part of its effort to sell war bonds. A popular tourist attraction was a system of trenches installed in the city on Kaiserinsel, where visitors could burrow through tunnels just like soldiers on the front. One day Kafka went to the office to invest his savings in war bonds, only to keep nervously second-guessing himself, turning around and heading back in circles until the office closed (as paralyzed by indecision as his badger). Afterward he visited the trench installation, noting in his diary: ‘Sight of the people swarming like ants in front of and inside the trench.’ (Years of Insight).
2) Artistic: in Stach’s formulation, Kafka’s entire career as a writer was committed to the production of a burrow, a system of fortifications that would protect him from distractions, obligations, and responsibilities (familial, professional, etc.) and give him the time he needed to concentrate. Stach: ‘Kafka wrote this text in late 1923, when he could look back on nearly a decade of his own intense burrowing. It is the diligent and neverending work on oneself required of anyone who regards security as the highest priority; it is, in other words, the joy and sorrow of the defensive’ (Years of Insight). As Kafka sums it up in his diary, ‘My prison cell—my fortress’ (The Decisive Years).
3) Medical: Finally, Stach reads the wheezy whistling of the haunted narrator—the sound of breath that is simultaneously the sound of death—as a figure for Kafka’s own tuberculosis, the lifelong lung ailment that would ultimately kill him (‘The Burrow’ was written six months before he died):
But this story has no need for a real conclusion; its actual, terrible core is biographical and can be inferred not from the text but from the circumstances under which it originated. The question of whether it is an enemy from without that threatens the burrow or whether the constant noise is a danger from within is of no consequence for someone suffering from tuberculosis. The noise of his own breath, which kept getting shorter, this sign of life that is always there but is fearful only to a sick man; this noise is the adversary. Kafka did not invent this metaphor but rather adapted it, and readers who take it literally come closest to understanding his text. (Years of Insight)
Quotes from “The Burrow” are from Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Schocken, 1995).
Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years. trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton UP: 2005).
Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight. trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton UP: 2013).
Bennett Sims is the author of the novel A Questionable Shape and the collections “White Dialogues” and “Other Minds and Other Stories.” He teaches fiction at the University of Iowa.
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