The Bucket Rider

Franz Kafka

The Complete Works of Franz Kafka 18권 · Continental Press

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Written during one of the coldest winters in Prague's history, The Bucket Rider emerged from Kafka's experiences during the wartime coal shortages of 1916-17. The story first appeared in the Prague Jewish weekly Selbstwehr at a time when the city's residents struggled to heat their homes. Kafka wrote it while living in his sister's house, where he witnessed firsthand the desperate scramble for fuel that marked the latter years of World War I. The story follows a man riding an empty coal bucket through the freezing air to beg for fuel from a coal dealer. Its surreal imagery - the bucket-rider floating weightlessly above the streets - transforms material deprivation into a kind of dark fairy tale. The protagonist's physical lightness, caused by his poverty and hunger, allows him to achieve a perverse form of flight. Yet this transcendence offers no escape from his desperate situation. The coal dealer's wife, who cannot see the floating supplicant, dismisses his pleas with brutal practicality, leaving him suspended between earth and sky, life and death. The text captures the particular anxiety of wartime Prague, where basic necessities became increasingly scarce. The coal dealer represents the new class of wartime profiteers who grew rich from others' desperation, while the invisible bucket-rider embodies the growing masses of impoverished citizens whom society had rendered ghostlike through neglect. Death hovers at the edges of the narrative - the rider's weightlessness suggests he may already be dead, his journey a kind of purgatorial replay of his final futile quest for warmth. Kafka's genius lies in transforming these concrete historical circumstances into a timeless parable about need, invisibility, and the cold calculation that freezes human empathy. This modern translation from the original German is a fresh, accessible and beautifully rendered text that brings to life Kafka's great literary work. This edition contains extra amplifying material including an illuminating afterword, a timeline of Kafka's life and works alongside of the historical events which shaped his art, and a short biography, to place this work in its socio-historical context. Kafka left many of his works unfinished or unpublished during his lifetime, relying on Max Brod to edit and release them after his death in 1924.

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A Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, Kafka's work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. His writings, such as "The Metamorphosis" and "The Trial," explore themes of alienation, existential anxiety, and guilt, and are influential in modernist literature.