SOURCE: “The Little Girl and the Cat: ‘Kafkaesque’ Elements in Arreola's ‘The Switchman,’” in The American Hispanist, Vol. 4, Nos. 34-35, March-April, 1979, pp. 3-4.

In the following essay, Cheever examines the style and theme of uncertainty in Arreola's “The Switchman,” which he argues is modeled after a short parable by Franz Kafka.

For many people the works of Franz Kafka have become a kind of locus classicus for the delineation and articulation of the problems and obsessions of twentieth-century man. W. H. Auden, for example, has asserted that “had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.”¹ Similarly, when the poet Alan Dugan entitles one of his most chilling and effective poems “Tribute to Kafka, for Someone Taken,”² he does so with the...