Amerika, also known as Der Verschollene or The Man Who Disappeared, was the incomplete first novel of author Franz Kafka, published posthumously in 1927. The novel originally began as a short story titled The Stoker.
- The first chapter of this novel is a short story titled “The Stoker”.
The story describes the bizarre wanderings of a seventeen-year-old European emigrant named Karl Rossmann in the United States, who was forced to go to New York to escape the scandal of his seduction by a housemaid. As the ship arrives in America, he becomes friends with a stoker who is about to be dismissed from his job. Karl identifies with the stoker and decides to help him; together they go to see the captain of the ship. In a surreal turn of events, Karl’s uncle, Senator Jacob, is in a meeting with the captain. Karl doesn’t know that Senator Jacob is his uncle, but Mr. Jacob recognizes him and takes him away from the stoker.
The story begins with the main character Karl Rossmann nervously waiting for his boat to dock in the harbor of New York City. Karl is not quite a willing visitor to these shores – after being seduced by a serving girl who subsequently became pregnant, Karl is being shipped to America by his parents. As the boat prepares to dock, he realizes that he’s left his umbrella below deck. When he goes to retrieve it, he gets lost on the ship, running into a series of strange characters who push him from one plot point to the next. It soon becomes obvious that Karl will spend the rest of the novel wandering.
The next two hundred pages or so follow Karl on his journey. As his meandering takes him through the worlds of the amazingly rich and the despicably poor, he makes and breaks friendships along the way, always trying to find a steady footing, and always getting tripped up somewhere down the line. To his credit, Karl never resorts to despair; and even when he is depressed, he seems ready to take on the next problem with what could only be described as a youthful exuberance. Amerika is said to be Kafka’s most optimistic work, and he even entertained notions of giving it a happy ending, with Karl finding a steady job and reuniting with his parents. However, a September 29, 1915 diary entry suggests a more pessimistic outcome, in which Karl is “destroyed by a legal sentence;” and while he is not “hurled to the ground,” he is at least “pushed to the side.” The novel itself, giving us no real conclusion, leaves us to contemplate both possibilities as Karl travels steadily into the infinite expanse of the West.