Kafka as a writer of interactive fiction

Kafka was notoriously incapable of finishing what he started. The benefit of him always starting anew is that there are many fragments still around that spawned from his curious mind. At Night belongs to my absolute favorites:

Deeply lost in the night.
Just as one sometimes lowers one’s head to reflect, thus to be utterly lost in the night. All around people are asleep. It’s just play acting, an innocent self-deception, that they sleep in houses, in safe beds, under a safe roof, stretched out or curled up on mattresses, in sheets, under blankets; in reality they have flocked together as they had once upon a time and again later in a deserted region, a camp in the open, a countless number of men, an army, a people, under a cold sky on cold earth, collapsed where once they had stood, forehead pressed on the arm, face to the ground, breathing quietly. And you are watching, are one of the watchmen, you find the next one by brandishing a burning stick from the brushwood pile beside you.
Why are you watching? Someone must watch, it is said. Someone must be there.

There are two things that make this a predecessor of interactive fiction. The first one is that it is written in second person pronoun – you. This mirrors the rhetorical device of a roleplaying game master, who always return to the question: “What do you do?” Kafka welcomes the reader into the world of fantasy as a potential player.

Secondly, the reader is explicitly assigned a role. You are “one of the watchmen”. The reader has a position and an assignment, a kind of player goal. The assignment is, with Kafka’s precise but elusive logic, unclear —but nonetheless binding. Someone has to watch and that someone happened to be you.

These two aspects of the fragment is already outstanding, but there is a third move that I find quite intriguing. Kafka reverses fiction and reality within the logic of the story. Kafka is writing in the night. Around him, people are sleeping “in safe beds, under a safe roof”. But in the diegetic story world, people are camping in a deserted region, “under a cold sky on cold earth, collapsed where once they had stood, forehead pressed on the arm, face to the ground”. And they dream of a safe place to stay.

Kafka’s writing has its face to the ground, listening to echoes from both the future and the past. In this time of displacement, you are the watchman.