Kafka's Apophatic Umbrella: Modeling Self‐Erasure in Der Verschollene

Abstract This article reads the image of the umbrella in Kafka's earliest novel‐fragment Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared) as a means of testing the limits of literary language. In addition to plotting the protagonist's precarious positionality, the umbrella Karl Roßmann forgets at the outset of the novel‐fragment proves an overdetermined object that performs a disappearing act that would be impossible for the work's title‐figure. Der Verschollene , the story of one lost to communication ( verschollen ), performs with its umbrella something denied the protagonist by the genre in which he appears. The umbrella that the text both emphasizes and disavows suggests the possibility that Der Verschollene is not just an Antibildungsroman , but a doomed attempt to compose a kind of Bildungsroman under erasure, an Entbildungsroman which leads not to the protagonist's integration, but to his ultimate disintegration and erasure by the very text that brings him into being.