The Bucket Rider is a story fragment by Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

. Written in 1921, the story is about a man looking for coal

Coal

Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...

 to fill his bucket. He is a poor man and hopes that the coaldealer will be generous enough to loan him some coal. He claims he'll pay the man back later. When he arrives, he pleads, but it soon becomes apparent the coaldealer and his wife are oblivious to his needs.

The wife in particular ignores his pleas, and the narrator scorns her. He leaves them in anger, "ascending to the ice mountains...lost forever."

Analysis

The story, the bulk of which is dialogue, has been interpreted as a philosophical discourse on the inevitable conflict between people due to innate differences between humans. Another intrepretation can be that the conflict between the coalrider and the coaldealer is due to a conflict arising in language, both a barrier and bridge among people.

According to one source, Kafka wrote the piece as a sketch to be developed into a longer story, perhaps a novella

Novella

A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...

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