Narration and the Experience of Estrangement in the Fiction of Franz Kafka and Maurice Blanchot

This article addresses connections between the fictional writings of Franz Kafka and Maurice Blanchot by examining the window motif in their stories. This motif has a central meaning for both writers, and exploring it will demonstrate the proximity between their literary works. The following analysis centers on four themes and/or processes associated with the window motif: the experience of estrangement in the narrator's ambiguous relation to the world, the intention to bridge the distance from the world by taking action, the manifestation of an outside in which the world has disappeared, and the text-immanent reflection of narrative readability. Exploring these topics reveals striking similarities between the two authors’ texts—not only on the level of metaphoric meaning, but also on the level of narrative technique.