Narrator, character, other: Kafka’s triangle in Fürsprecher

Abstract

Franz Kafka's protagonists are conspicuously featureless, and yet Kafka is persistently read as a fabulist of the plight of the individual before impervious, impersonal, and indifferent legal structures. How can Kafka champion the individual against such forces when his heroes do not have personalities to lose? This essay addresses that question through a close reading of Kafka's “Fürsprecher” from the standpoint of Rüdiger Campe's concept of Fürsprache . Kafka's characters are featureless because they are stand‐ins for the process of fictional narration, itself an instance of the situation of rhetorical speech. Two primary advantages of Fürsprache as a narratological technique are outlined, including its capacity to register multiple personas within the same speaker.