〈犬の知〉から語られるディスクール－フランツ・カフカの『ある犬の研究』

Abstract

The short story “Forschungen eines Hundes” was written by Franz Kafka in 1922. It was written in the first person, and the protagonist is a dog who can behave and think almost like a human being. The dog researches "food", "music" and his strange dog companions, and inserts anecdotal episodes between reports of his world. Canetti’s investigation has found that Kafka’s writing’s major theme was focused on the impossibility or difficulty of human beings perceiving the truth of reality, after “Aphorismen” which was written by Kafka between 1918-1920 (in the evening of the author’s life). By choosing a dog as a protagonist who has finite cognizance, Kafka succeeded in defining the limit of perception of human beings in “Forschungen eines Hundes”. From this point of view the paper describes how Kafka saw that difficulty in perceiving the truth of reality, and then how he verbalized it into the discourse of the protagonist. The protagonist-dog tells nothing to the reader of objective truth in the story. It is a characteristic of his discourse. By analysis of the content of the narration, I interpreted the limited subject perception which Kafka believed in.