Abstract
This study aims to clarify the literary status of Hrabal’s Kain (1949) and to present a coherent interpretation, with the interpretational line leading from the positions of the philosophy of existence and the hermeneutics of Dasein. I was brought over to this view by the very structure of the story (the philosophy of existence, the problem of “being in” a fictional world and not least, the topos of the intermediate situation) and its reception by literary criticism.
As is well known, the story of Kain is generally viewed as a text with the epithet “existential”, which in the given context is a reference in particular to its similarity to Camus’s L’Étranger (1942, czech 1947). Those who hold this interpretational view have based the closeness of these two texts both on the similar structure of the narrative and on the similar characterization of the chief protagonists.
However, the primary thesis of this study offers readers a different interpretational position: although Kain is indisputably a text with numerous existential motifs, in my view to see it in terms of Camus‑style existentialism (a hackneyed cliché) indicates one has succumbed to the author’s self‑stylization. I endeavour to shed light on this false trail in a comparison of Kain with L’Étranger and in the interpretation by Kees Mercks, where the concept of indifference is shown to be the problematic aspect of the analysis.