The Tunnel is a short story

Short story

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theatre whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author's work included avant-garde dramas, philosophically deep crime novels, and often macabre satire...

, that came out in 1952. The story appears in the book "The Tunnel“ (1964). It belongs to the most important works of Dürrenmatt and is a classic among the surrealistic short stories. With the beginning of the story, Dürrenmatt parodies Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...

. The first sentence is very long and nested. Furthermore, Dürrenmatts student is in a train and likes cigars – just like the young man in The Magic Mountain

The Magic Mountain

The Magic Mountain is a novel by Thomas Mann, first published in November 1924. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of 20th century German literature....

(Der Zauberberg).

Synopsis

The protagonist is a 24 year old student, a fat and cigar-smoking loner, who boards his usual train to reach his university, but surprisingly, when the train enters a very small tunnel, the tunnel doesn’t end. The darkness continues for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes. The student gets nervous, but the other passengers are calm, because they don’t see (or don’t want to see) the imminent catastrophe. The student finds the train conductor, and questions him about what is going on with the train. The conductor is evasive at first, but eventually leads the student to the locomotive, which is empty. The conductor tells the student that the engineer already jumped when he realized what was happening to the train. After a failed attempt to pull the emergency brake, the train gets faster and faster, tipping into an abyss. Finally, the train is heading completely vertically and the falling student lands on the front glass of the still falling locomotive, where he greedily stares into the oncoming darkness.
The train conductor, ever concerned with duty, asks what they should do, but the student answers: “Nothing (...) God let us fall. And now we'll come upon him.” Later, Dürrenmatt modified the ending. In the second version, first published in 1978, the last two sentences (one sentence in the German original: "Gott ließ uns fallen, und so stürzen wir denn auf ihn zu") are omitted and the story ends with the word "Nothing".

Interpretation

The racing train could be interpreted as every life that inescapably approaches a catastrophe (death, the unknown). Terror can be breaking in a life without warning, and the people hide themselves behind banality. The last sentence of the story interprets this terror as will of God, but that does not make terror clearer.

Another interpretation is the story is a social commentary on the ignorance of society in the face of imminent disaster, as people place unquestioning trust in leaders without concern for where they are being led. The last sentence spoken by the student comments on the fall of the ultimate authority figure, God, and how placing trust in falsely constructed authority will only result in the downfall of society.

Literature

• "Die schönsten Kurzgeschichten aus aller Welt", Band 2, Verlag Das Beste 1976, S.724-733