Like Dürrenmatt, Walser took Brecht's parables as his starting point, but instead of analysing social structures in general terms to convince an audience of the need for political action (Brecht) or to challenge them to imagine a more rational world (Dürrenmatt), his aim is to create a state of self-awareness through recognition. Reality is defined by perception, not by objective fact, and in his novels details of everyday life are presented through the protagonists' vision, existing only as components of a stream of consciousness. This worm's eye or key-hole perspective, accumulating minutae to portray the mentality of a representative figure—ironically named Kristlein, petty Christ, in Half Time (Halbzeit) and The Unicorn (Das Einhorn)—is not possible on the stage, and in his plays Walser replaces it with an openly symbolic world. In Rabbit Race this is deliberately crude. The oak around which the action takes...