SARTRE AND THE FANTASTIC UNIVERSE

Abstract

The short story “Preocupação do pai de família”, by Franz Kafka, allows shedding some light
on what can be called Kafkaesque realism, from a perspective of understanding the pair fantastic-realism
as established by Sartre in the essay “Aminadab, ou o o fantastic considered as a language” (1943). It is
an indirect realism, which operates in the opposite direction to that of naive and mythical realism. This
question is not new and has been raised by several authors, as far apart in time and space as, for example,
the German Günter Anders (1934), the Frenchman Maurice Blanchot (essays assembled in 1981) and the
Brazilian Roberto Schwarz (1966). In this article we seek to interpret Kafka's short story based on the
foundations brought by Sartre in his 1943 essay. We try to assume as a hypothesis that the movement that
the father of the family (the one that aims at the dradeck and seeks to define him) operates as verification
of a way of being, which at the beginning is confused with the way of existing of the sign, then with the
of a thing and which, finally, emerges as a revelation of a conscience. This, however, is not a matter of
any or abstract consciousness, but determined and situated. Each paragraph thus represents a stage of
anticipation of this being, then discarded as a false hypothesis, and successively the father weaves together a web of errors that does not end, however, in the (definitive) error, as it continually bites its own
tail, as in which each hypothesis is set aside as non-verification of being, but always representing the
passage in its dialectical sense of denial of the given towards a true verification.