Narrative temporality and the aspect of time in Franz Kafka's short fiction

Time figures prominently as an implicit and, to a lesser extent, explicit theme in much of Franz Kafka's short fiction. In Kafka, the concept of time cannot be defined merely as clock time. Rather, Kafka's understanding of temporality encompasses a broad range of significations, including time as measurement, time as a regulator of social life, time as history, time as eternal or transitory, and time as the limit of human existence. The contours of time are variably contracted and dilated in the texts, both in respect to the characters' experience of time and to the textual representation and function of time in the fictional narrative structure.;I divide the subject of time into three basic categories in my interpretation of the short fiction: time in narratological, structural and metaphysical terms. The three chapters of the dissertation reflect these three categorical divisions. The first chapter, "The Arrow of Time: Time in Narratological. Terms," encompasses the narratological concepts of narrated time versus the time of narration, the linearity of the narrative event, and narrative grammar and tense. Chapter 2, "Das Zeitgerust: Time in Structural Terms," examines the temporal configuration of the fictional text as a structure with a roughly definable beginning, middle and end. The question of the narrative's chronology versus the causality of the plot is fundamental here, as is the issue of gaps in chronology and causality. The final chapter of the study, "Time in Metaphysical Terms," is concerned with an analysis of Kafkan temporality in relation to the human measurement of time, the 'no time and no place' of Kafka's fictional settings, and the conception of death as the limit of human experience. The notion that time in Kafka is frequently presented as an ungraspable lacuna is central to this chapter.;The principal works under consideration in the dissertation are Das Urteil, Die Verwandlung, the Jager texts, Ein Landarzt, Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer, Ein alltaglicher Vorfall and Ein Hungerkunstler.