Uncanny Animals in Kafka’s Short Stories

This paper explores Franz Kafka’s animal characters as a means of producing uncanny (unheimlich) effects in Kafka’s short stories. Its analysis draws primarily on the works of Sigmund Freud and his notions of the uncanny, repression, and negation. Through close textual analysis, this paper argues Kafka’s animals as a stage for the contradictions that would typically threaten the unity of human subjectivity. In his animal-centric narratives, Kafka defamiliarizes the familiar, through repetition and double-creation. The conclusions of this paper are limited by the assumption of a European history of associations with non-rational animals through the 20th Century as a ground for the ‘familiarity’ that Kafka’s animal characters produce and reframe.