Franz Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog” stands as one of his most enigmatic and compelling works, delving into profound philosophical questions through the lens of a singular, maladjusted canine. Written towards the end of Kafka’s life in the autumn of 1922, this unfinished and posthumously published novella, originally titled Forschungen eines Hundes (“Researches of a Dog”) by his friend Max Brod, offers a unique blend of humor and deep introspection. It presents a world where a dog’s relentless pursuit of truth challenges established dogma and societal norms, making it a pivotal text for understanding Kafka’s broader philosophical concerns and his critique of knowledge systems. To fully appreciate this work, one must navigate its layers of satire, philosophical inquiry, and the distinct brand of dark humor that defines a true Kafka’s dog novella.
The Origins of a Canine Enigma
While Kafka’s name is often synonymous with the oppressive, labyrinthine legal systems depicted in works like “The Trial,” “Investigations of a Dog” unveils another crucial facet of his genius: his engagement with the nature of knowledge itself. The story is a brilliant, at times hilarious, parody of intellectual pursuit and what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan termed “the university discourse.” In an academic landscape frequently characterized by nonsensical rankings, market-driven directives, and expanding administrative bureaucracy, the contemporary university itself can often feel Kafkaesque.
Lacan’s concept extends beyond mere institutional mismanagement; it highlights a fundamental shift in the structure of authority, where knowledge and power converge to create administrative systems justified by reason and technical advancement. It is precisely this new order that Kafka’s dog protagonist sets out to question, seeking to expose the hidden biases beneath its supposed neutrality and to forge an alternative path of inquiry. The dog, therefore, becomes a symbol of the dissident intellect, tirelessly probing the foundational assumptions of his world.
A Dog’s Eccentric Pursuits: The Journey of Self-Discovery
Narrated entirely by the dog, the story chronicles his diverse “escapades in theory.” His investigative instincts are first ignited by a “psychedelic concert”—the mesmerizing song and dance of the musical dogs. From this initial spark, his curiosity leads him to confront the central mystery of the canine world: the origin of food. He devises an array of unconventional experiments to determine the food source, muses on a mythical breed of dogs rumored to float in the air, and relentlessly poses questions to which he receives no answers. A recurring theme in his quest is the “silence of the dogs”—a seemingly insurmountable barrier to his research and a profound lament for the missing “word that could transform dogdom.” Exploring such canine narrated tales often reveals deeper insights into perceptions of reality.
*Albrecht Dürer’s “A greyhound,” created in 1501, portrays a contemplative canine figure.*
The dog’s investigations culminate in a truly radical endeavor: an extended fast undertaken to penetrate the enigma of nourishment. This experiment almost proves fatal, ending with the investigator’s near-death experience. He awakens to a vivid vision of a beautiful hunting dog singing to him, though the melody seems to float in the air independently. The story concludes with a summary of the dog’s philosophical revelations, ironically dubbed Kafka’s “System of Science,” which culminates in the “science of freedom”—the story’s powerful final word. Gustave Flaubert’s “Dictionary of Received Ideas” famously defines a dog as “Especially created to save its master’s life. Man’s best friend.” Kafka, in true Flaubertian spirit, dismantles this cliché of canine loyalty. His dog is not subservient but devoted to truth, risking his own life to liberate himself from domination and uncover the hidden forces that shape his existence. Through this fraught journey, the dog grapples with fundamental questions: Can one truly befriend truth? What kind of dissident science emerges from such a relationship? And who are his allies in this struggle? This journey makes it a compelling Kafka’s philosophical short story.
Unpacking Kafka’s Unique Humor: The Invisible Masters
“Investigations of a Dog” is not only a profound philosophical exploration but also a unique demonstration of Kafka’s humor. It functions as a “theoretical burlesque,” where research involves singing into holes, dancing with the earth, speculating about flying dogs, and enduring severe food deprivation. Often described as the “jokiest” of Kafka’s fictions, the entire narrative can be seen as one extended, elaborate joke, akin to a “shaggy-dog story” – fittingly, the narrator describes himself as of a “woolly” breed. The tale meanders through various misadventures without a clear climax or resolution, until it simply trails off.
The punchline, though never explicitly stated, permeates every aspect of the dog’s encounters, the mysteries he faces, and his entire research program. The core of this cosmic joke is that dogs do not see human beings. Humans are, in effect, the “elephants in the room”—the invisible masters of the universe. From a human reader’s perspective, this massive void in canine perception leads the dog into a series of comical predicaments and pseudoproblems. The dog laments, “Recently I have taken more and more to casting up my life, looking for the decisive, the fundamental error that I must surely have made; and I cannot find it.” This very blindness is the fundamental error upon which all his investigations rest.
Consider the fantastical concert: it is easily explained once we realize the dog has stumbled upon a performance by trained circus dogs. Their upright posture, so shocking to the puppy, is part of an act, the loud music produced by a human organ grinder, and the labyrinth of wooden bars merely chair legs, appearing as an impenetrable maze from ground level. Similarly, the enigma of nourishment is solved by understanding that an invisible hand provides food to hungry hounds. The Lufthunde, or “air dogs,” are simply pampered lapdogs carried by aristocratic ladies, or, in modern terms, in designer pet carriers. The hunting dog episode echoes Laska from Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” warning Kafka’s dog of Levin and his shotgun, as Tolstoy himself daringly shifted perspective into the hunting dog’s stream of consciousness. Such stories from a dog’s view offer profound literary insights.
Beyond Satire: The Philosophical Depth of the Joke
While “Investigations of a Dog” is meticulously constructed, its comedic nature poses a significant interpretive challenge. Is it merely an extended intellectual gag, a satire on philosophy mocking metaphysical speculation? For an interpreter, the risk of appearing ridiculous by taking the dog’s philosophical quest too seriously is real. Yet, the story is a brilliant exercise in Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie, or “estrangement/defamiliarization.” What is being defamiliarized here, in essence, is the very structure of Kafka’s own fiction.
In a letter to Milena Jesenská, Kafka articulated what could be considered the fundamental formula of his narratives: “3 circles: an innermost circle A, then B, then C.” C represents the subject, living under an incomprehensible injunction from A that renders life impossible, an impossibility navigated through the gatekeepers, go-betweens, and messengers comprising B – the “little others” who act on behalf of the remote and inaccessible A, the grand Autre or big Other.
Applied to “Investigations of a Dog,” two aspects become prominent. First, the story radically amplifies the distance and withdrawal of the central authority (A) to the point of virtual disappearance. There is no mysterious Castle, no inaccessible Law, no unreachable Emperor; A has effectively vanished. Meanwhile, B—the accelerating progress of scientific knowledge that governs dogdom, the “Dog University”—flourishes. However, this accumulation of knowledge has grown so vast and unmasterable that it has acquired some of the opacity of A itself.
Second, Kafka introduces another twist regarding C, the subject. As domination becomes more intractable and invisible, the striving for freedom becomes all the more imperative. While C in the original setup suffers from an obscure injunction making life unlivable, the dog, too, perceives his calling as an obscure, even monstrous, and unachievable task. Yet, he is far less subservient to external agency than most of Kafka’s anguished heroes. Instead of seeking official permission, he authorizes his own investigations, inviting others to join his philosophical quest to fundamentally transform dogdom. He is the Kafkian agent, striving to introduce a sense of the Kafkaesque to a world that prefers to remain ignorant of it. Kafka’s dog is the intrepid researcher who interrogates the gaps in the edifice of knowledge, pointing to the unbearable, unspeakable secret of—the dogs’ domestication.
Screwball Tragedy: The Inextricable Link of Necessity and Impossibility
We need a new term to encapsulate Kafka’s distinctive dark humor: a “screwball tragedy.” “Investigations of a Dog” exemplifies this perfectly as a theoretical burlesque where academic-level research entails singing into holes, dancing with the earth, conjecturing about flying dogs, and enduring severe food deprivation. It literalizes what Hans Blumenberg called “theory as exotic behavior” in his analysis of the oldest philosophical joke: the story of Thales and the Thracian maid.
Philosophy, from its very inception, was perceived as an eccentric, “exotic” practice, detached from everyday life and its pragmatic concerns. The stargazing Thales, the first philosopher, falling into a well and being ridiculed by a servant girl, is philosophy’s seminal joke—a joke told by and at the expense of philosophy to convey its own strangeness and detachment from life. Blumenberg demonstrates how the joke’s history, with its countless variations, is coextensive with the history of philosophy itself. Kafka’s tale also partakes in this tradition, offering another retelling. While the dog’s oddball investigations literalize theory’s exoticism and remoteness from daily life, Kafka’s story simultaneously literalizes Socrates’s response to the joke.
Plato’s account reveals Socrates’s remarkable strategy: he escalates the stakes rather than defending philosophy’s value. He suggests that the philosopher loses not only the physical ground beneath his feet but also the metaphysical ground of being and thought, to the point of no longer knowing who or what he is. What if, in Kafka’s context, the cogito were a dogito? This takes us closer to the core of Kafka’s humor. The “screwy” aspect of the dog’s investigations—and what “screwball tragedy” conveys—lies in their faltering, persistently thwarted yet endlessly revitalized nature; the Kafkaesque blend of necessity and impossibility, indispensability and hopelessness, perseverance in its purest, most empty form. Throughout his theoretical adventures, the dog continuously trips over himself, simultaneously propelled and stymied by an insurmountable inner force. For a more comprehensive analysis of Kafka’s dog, one must consider these profound internal conflicts.
The idea of screwball tragedy finds its purest illustration in one of Kafka’s variations on the Don Quixote story: “One of the most important quixotic acts, more obtrusive than fighting the windmill, is: suicide. The dead Don Quixote wants to kill the dead Don Quixote; in order to kill, however, he needs a place that is alive, and this he searches for with his sword, both ceaselessly and in vain. Engaged in this occupation the two dead men, inextricably interlocked and positively bouncing with life, go somersaulting away down the ages.” Here, Kafka presents an original philosophy of life as a continually failed suicide. The dead subject, through vain attempts to extinguish the last bit of life, paradoxically springs “bouncingly alive.” This repeated failure is the missing “place that is alive,” the source of an exuberant, uncanny vitality. Kafka encapsulates this twisted metaphysical humor in his notebooks: “One cannot not-live, after all.” Unlike formal logic, this “cannot not” does not simply mean “can”; it signifies that “can” asserts itself only through the detour of a primordial impossibility that both drives and undoes it. Kafka’s Don Quixote lives by continually failing to kill himself, unkillable because he is already dead, thus “somersaulting away down the ages.”
The Treacherous Path: Limping Towards Freedom
Tilting at windmills, the iconic Cervantine image of fighting imaginary enemies, symbolizes Don Quixote’s self-fashioned literary existence. Kafka’s quixotic suicide pushes this concept of simulated existence further: virtual or symbolic life becomes its own delirious adversary. Kafka’s Don Quixote tilts at himself. Kafka’s characters are, in various ways, victims of themselves, their own “imaginary” adversaries. Yet, they find vitality precisely in their failure to cancel themselves out, by orbiting their own impossibility, by failing to not-live. The frequent appearance of animals, crossbreeds, and uncanny nonhumans in Kafka’s work—the dog embodying the thinker—is significant because they best articulate this internally divided being, which only misrecognizes itself by conceiving of itself as a superior, masterful “human” creature.
Kafka’s protagonists are driven by an exceeding drivenness, and “Investigations of a Dog” is the story of this drive to philosophize—the “theory drive.” The added dimension is that the philosopher becomes reflexively aware of this drivenness’s structure, offering clues to understanding the general form of Kafka’s other fictions. Kafka’s dog cannot not-think. Despite his focused efforts, the canine philosopher cannot fully comprehend himself and his world; he fails to pierce the wall of silence—the tragic dimension. However, he also cannot not-think these things—the screwball dimension—thus persisting in his idiosyncratic inquiries and iconoclastic methods, in what he calls his “hopeless but indispensable little investigations.”
The dog pushes forward as if the true path is less a route to be followed than an obstacle to be stumbled over. One of Kafka’s aphorisms states: “The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along.” This can be seen as a counterpoint to the Thales joke: instead of gazing heavenward, the theorist focuses on the ground, yet the ground itself has become treacherous—a tripwire for the thinker. Here, we can recall Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which explores the self-destructive and self-sabotaging aspects of psychic life. Is not the death drive Freud’s name for quixotic suicide? The essay concludes with the quote: “What we cannot reach flying we must reach limping… The Book tells us it is no sin to limp.” “Investigations of a Dog” features images of flying and levitation, a longed-for transcendence, but it is this internally inhibited or arrested movement that best captures the faltering course of the dog’s inquiries. Limping, stumbling, or “somersaulting away down the ages”: these are physical metaphors for thought grappling with its own impossibility—a word with special resonance for Kafka.
Alberto Manguel notes that “According to ancient lore, dogs are supposed to recognize angelic presences before humans can see them” in his essay on Dante’s dogs. But not Kafka’s dogs. They are deprived of this extrasensory gift; they lack a special sense for the beyond and, indeed, fail to perceive the reality directly before their eyes. Manguel parallels the mystery of God for humans with how humans must appear to dogs: “To this framing orthodoxy belong the savage examples of God’s judgment, the gratuitous demonstrations of God’s mercy, the divine hierarchies of bliss, and the infernal gradations of punishment: all beyond human understanding, much as our erratic behavior must be beyond the understanding of dogs.” Thus, God is to man as man is to dog. (Francis Bacon, as early as the 17th century, observed: “For take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on when he finds himself maintained by a man, who to him is instead of a god.”)
Yet, for Kafka’s dogs, there is no man-God. His dogs are “top dogs,” masters of a realm where knowledge reigns supreme. Max Brod summarized the story as a “melancholy travesty of atheism.” However, another interpretation exists. Kafka reverses Manguel’s idea of dogs’ special angel sense. His dog possesses a nose not for emissaries of another world, but for the fissures within this one. While deferring to scientific progress and canine knowledge, the philosopher dog discerns the inconsistencies and distortions, the cracks and gaps in their systems. “I bow before their knowledge… but content myself with wriggling out through the gaps, for which I have a particularly good nose.” Following the shaggy-dog joke’s logic, these gaps would signal an “other world”: hidden masters, invisible human owners, unnoticed gods of dogs. But what if this notion of hidden masters is itself a comical ruse, and the truth is that control comes not from invisible external forces but from our own actions? This is a key theme for writers exploring dog’s perspective novels.
*The book cover for “How to Research Like a Dog” by Aaron Schuster, from which this article is adapted, visually captures the essence of a canine philosopher.*
We, as human beings, are self-domesticating animals, the wild and endlessly inventive architects of our own cages. Paradoxically, the very wildness of our self-domestication points to an untamed freedom. This inherent contradiction is precisely why our investigations into freedom are simultaneously indispensable and profoundly hopeless.
Conclusion
“Investigations of a Dog” remains a deeply resonant and humorous exploration of the nature of knowledge, authority, and freedom. Through the eyes of a curious, philosophical dog, Kafka crafts a brilliant satire of academic discourse while probing the existential dilemmas of existence itself. The story’s unique blend of “screwball tragedy” highlights the persistent, yet inherently thwarted, quest for truth within a world defined by invisible forces and self-imposed limitations. Kafka’s genius lies in transforming canine perception into a profound metaphor for the human condition, inviting readers to question their own “blindness” and the systems of knowledge that govern their lives. Delve deeper into Kafka’s profound and humorous explorations, and consider how our own “investigations” shape our understanding of the world and our place within it.
References
- Schuster, Aaron. How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science. MIT Press, 2024.
- Schuster, Aaron. The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis. MIT Press, 2017.
