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Diaries,” in
Franz Kafka (1883–1983): His Craft and Thought,
ed. R. Struc (Waterloo, Ont., 1986), pp. 101–16.
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    6. Kafka,
Letters to Milena,
ed. Willi Haas (New York, 1962), p. 196.
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    7. Kafka,
Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors
(New York, 1977), p. 98.
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    8. See Wolfgang Jahn, “Kafkas Handschrift zum
Verschollenen,” in Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft
(Stuttgart, 1957), p. 549.
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    9. The German title,
Der Verschollene,
presents a challenge for translators, since it is impossible to do justice in English to all nuances of the original.
Der Verschollene
is both characteristically succinct—consisting solely of a noun derived from the past participle of a verb and the masculine definite article indicating the gender of the missing person—and paradoxical, for it raises a meta-fictional question about the provenance of this story about a youth who has gone missing without trace, especially since the infinitive of the verb in question, namely,
verschallen,
means “to cease making a sound” or “to fade away.” See
Wahrig Deutsches Wörterbuch
(Gütersloh, 1972).
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    10. See Camill Hoffmann’s early review of “The Stoker” in
Franz Kafka: Kritik und Rezeption
1912–1924 (Frankfurt, 1979), pp. 47–49.
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    11. Heinz Politzer,
Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), p. 123.
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    12. For a discussion of the critical reception of
Der Verschollene, see Kafka-Hardbuch,
vol. 2, ed. Hartmut Binder (Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 407–20.
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    13. See Mark Harman, “Making Everything a ‘little uncanny’: Kafka’s Deletions in the Manuscript of
Das Schloß,
” in
Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka,
ed. James Rolleston (Rochester, N.Y., 2002), pp. 325–46.
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    14. See Mark Anderson, “Kafka and New York: Notes on a Traveling Narrative,” in
Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism,
ed. Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick (New York, 1989), p. 149.
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    15. Kafka’s pun on the double meaning of the word
Laufbahn—
“career” or “racetrack”—in a letter about Robert Walser anticipates a comparable conceit in the theater chapter of
The Missing Person
. See
Robert Walser Rediscovered,
ed. Mark Harman (Hanover, N.H., 1985), pp. 139–40.
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    16. The theater chapter at the end of the novel is prefigured by a brief fragment—probably written in early February 1912—in which Karl corrects the words of a servant who has introduced him as an actor by saying that he merely wants to become one. See
Der Verschollene: Apparatband
(Frankfurt, 1983), pp. 49, 71–73.
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    17. Karl adds that this negative verdict confirms what he has already read about the United States. If Kafka is referring obliquely here to Holitscher or Soukup, he—or at least his hero Karl—is endorsing stinging critiques of the American system. Some early critics detected a strong element of social criticism in the novel. For instance, the philosopher Adorno argued that Kafka’s insight “into economic tendencies was not so alien . . . as the hermetic method of his narrative techniques would lead us to assume.” See Theodor W. Adorno,
Prisms
(Boston, 1977), p. 260. One German scholar even asserted that the novel “mercilessly” uncovers “the hidden economic and psychological mechanism of this society and its satanic consequences.” See Wilhelm Emrich,
Franz Kafka,
trans. S. Z. Buehne (New York, 1968), p. 276. Others rejected the idea that the novel represents a critique of American—or capitalist—society on the grounds that its true theme is “not the reality, present or future, of a civilization far away from Kafka’s Prague, but the growth, both personal and intellectual, of Karl