Transcendance lost: The desire for an inaccessible noumenon in the short fiction of Gogol and Kafka

Considering the myriad of thematic and structural similarities present in the fiction of Nikolai Gogol and Franz Kafka, it is odd that until recently comparisons between the two authors have been relatively few. Many of the comparisons which have been made deal primarily with the striking similarities between two specific stories: Gogol's "The Nose" and Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." The purpose of this dissertation is to explore beyond the obvious similarities between these two specific stories to an essential epistemological connection discernable in the works of both authors in general. It finds that in several stories by both authors a consistent attitude toward ideal knowledge is expressed in similar structural and thematic terms.;The second chapter explains how Gogol's Old World Landowners reflects a critique of idealism in its chronotopic structure. Throughout this story Gogol sets up spatial and temporal structures which help indicate that the world of the old couple is a failed ideal--the loss of which the narrator laments. The next chapter demonstrates how Kafka makes a similar critique of idealism using similar temporal and spatial structures in The Burrow. In this story Kafka presents a narrator who attempts to construct an ideal world, fails, and in the end faces the horror of an inscrutable noumenal world.;The fourth and fifth chapters examine three stories from each author which involve the failure on the part of a character to bring together two identities: one material and inauthentic; the other ideal, superior, and inaccessible. In the last story discussed in each of these chapters, the author subverts the traditional literary topos of transcendence to an ideal world into parody, in the case of Gogol, and nightmare, in the case of Kafka. Both authors end these stories with an unhappy vision of the human epistemological condition: we are caught in a twilight zone between two separate worlds--the phenomenal and transcendent--unable to find meaning in the world that exerts the most power on us, the phenomenal or material, and unable to penetrate to the world which we know offers certain meaning, the transcendent, noumenal, or ideal.