ABSTRACT
154The first volume of Medicine and Literature opened with my enthusiastic report on Kafka’s short story A Country Doctor. Now we are going back to Kafka to have a look at some more of his brilliant, enigmatic stories, in particular the ones featuring animals. Was Kafka an animal lover? I don’t think he ever kept one as a pet, but in his stories he often seems to imagine himself as an animal with human feelings and aspirations. We are going to look at three of these stories, in which the featured creatures are respectively a beetle, a mole (or is it a badger?) and a singing mouse. We’ll begin with the beetle.
