SOURCE: “Franz Grillparzer's The Poor Fiddler: The Terror of Rejection,” in American Imago, Vol. 36, No. 2, Summer, 1979, pp. 118-46.

In the following essay, Mahlendorf argues that the two main characters in Grillparzer's The Poor Fiddler, Jacob and the narrator, are actually two aspects of Grillparzer himself, and that the story was probably the author's attempt to resolve his creative dilemma of how to continue writing despite critical rejection.

Introduction

Grillparzer's story The Poor Fiddler (written from 1831-1842) portrays two artists, Jacob the fiddler, who is a total failure, and the narrator of the story, a dramatist in search of dramatic material, who lives and works in a manner entirely different from the fiddler. Narrator and fiddler are two different aspects of the author's own being. Both characters, though in different ways, are concerned with the problem of rejection. Through his two artist figures, Grillparzer compares and contrasts two different...