Resumo de The Shorter Stories 3rd Review

ABSTRACT ? FRANZ KAFKA ? THE SHORTER STORIES in THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES. 1999 Vintage Classics My third and final review of random stories from this macabre collection of existential nightmares. In Jackals And Arabs, jackals in the desert have come to despise the nomadic Arab peoples. When they meet their first Western traveller, the jackals talk to him, begging him to talk the Arabs into leaving. The man tells the Arabs who laugh and throw a dead camel to the jackals that eat the gift from their supposed mortal enemies without gratitude. The Bucket Rider tells of a man desperate for coal. He is so starved that he actually takes to the air, flying in the bucket he hoped to fill with coal. He asks a coal seller for coal on credit, and the coal seller wants to help, but he doesn?t think to look skywards, so he doesn?t see the desperate man. The coal-seller?s wife does see him, but mischievously pretends that she hasn?t. The winds, never to be seen again, blow the man away. In The New Advocate, Bucephelus escapes the war campaigns of Alexander The Great by moving to the 20th century to study law. Eleven Sons is a rather pointless piece in which the narrator describes eleven sons, one by one. Er, that?s it. My Neighbour is about office paranoia. A salesman resents the successes of a telephone sales rep in the same firm who sells well than he does. He is convinced that the other rep is eavesdropping through thin office walls on his telephone business to steal his customers from him. A Crossbreed, subtitled A Sport is about a man with a strange pet, which is half cat, half sheep. The animal is deeply confused, and seems to want to be killed with a butcher?s knife, but its owner loves it too much and therefore it is dammed to live out its whole life. A Common Confusion is about two men, known as A and B, who wish to discuss business but keep just missing one another at their pre-arranged rendezvous. A finally gets near B, but A slips and injures himself and he cannot call for help to B as the increasingly impatient B leaves in anger to take his business elsewhere. The Truth About Sancho Panza simply gives Kafka?s opinion that Panza is the real hero of Don Quixote for being level headed and not giving in to his master?s flights of fancy.

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