The Resident of the “Third-Floor Window” More Terrifying Than a Murderer. A Close Reading of Kafka’s “A Fratricide”

Have you ever felt a faint unease when seeing someone report their happiness on social media? Or when witnessing someone’s downfall or a fierce controversy online, is there a cruel part of you that secretly enjoys it from a safe distance? Kafka’s “A Fratricide” is a story that peers into the abyss of such hearts.

1. Light: Wese’s Sincerity and “Enclosed Happiness”

“Mrs. Wese, reassured by the bell, shut her window with a rattle.” The victim, Wese, is an honest man who works late at his office. Hearing the bell that announces his return, his wife feels relieved and shuts the window. This single sentence symbolizes the “modest and ordinary happiness” they enjoy. However, at the very moment she closes the window, her husband is about to be murdered in the outside world. The act of “closing the window” serves as a barricade to protect their own happiness, while simultaneously demonstrating their complete blindness to the external absurdity (murderous intent).

2. Flame: Schmar’s Abnormal Fever

“Where everything else was freezing, Schmar alone was burning.” Meanwhile, the murderer Schmar lies in wait under the freezing sky, his thin coat unbuttoned. He is not a robber after money. What lies within him is not cold-blooded murderous intent, but a boiling “ideological fever”. He intends to kill Wese, a former drinking buddy (a brother-like figure). This is not mere hatred, but an explosion of a twisted love-hate (Hassliebe) toward Wese, whose “efforts are rewarded and who lives a happy daily life,” standing in stark contrast to himself.

3. Collision: Why Did the Murder Occur?

Why did he have to kill his former friend? To Schmar, the righteous belief held by Wese that “working earnestly leads to happiness” was an unbearable violence. Schmar sought to prove the cruel truth of this world — that “not all dreams of happiness bear fruit” — through Wese’s death. For him, the murder was the “completion of his ideology”.

4. Cynicism: Pallas’s Gaze and Us Today

“Pallas, a private citizen, was watching it all.” However, the truly terrifying part of this story begins here. There is a man named Pallas who watched this gruesome ideological collision from his third-floor window as a “private citizen”. He could have called for help, but he simply watched in silence. Furthermore, when the crime is over, it is even described that he was “satisfied”. Why was he satisfied? Because he fully enjoyed the murder as a “spectacle”. Watching the culprit get arrested, he immersed himself in a twisted sense of justice, thinking, “I was standing on the right side, watching everything”. Isn’t this figure of Pallas a reflection of us today? Through the screens of our smartphones, we consume the moments when someone’s life is destroyed as “controversies” or “scandals,” and finally post “righteous” comments to satisfy ourselves. Before we know it, perhaps all of us have become “residents of the third-floor window”.

5. Why Does Cynicism Drown Out Absurdity?

Cases where “someone’s desperate screams or bare absurdity are reduced to a ‘mere spectacle’ by the cynicism and indifference of those around them,” just like Pallas depicted by Kafka, are overflowing in the real world and in our daily lives. Here are a few examples that symbolize this structure.

• SNS “Controversies” and “Digital Voyeurism”
• In modern times, the existence closest to Pallas might be ourselves, watching someone’s downfall or tragedy through our smartphone screens. When a person raises their voice against a social absurdity, instead of facing the essence of the appeal (the absurdity), overflowing cynical comments nitpick things like “I don’t like the way you said it” or “You had this fault in the past,” drowning out the person’s earnest screams. Spectators consume the destruction of someone else’s life as content without leaving their safe “third-floor window (screen),” gaining only the satisfaction of saying “They brought it upon themselves” or “I saw it correctly,” and return to their daily lives.
• Kevin Carter’s “The Vulture and the Little Girl” (1993)
• This case, which remains in the history of photojournalism, highlighted the cruelty inherent in the “bystander’s perspective”. This photo capturing the famine in Sudan showed an exhausted young girl and a vulture waiting for her death. The photo shocked the world and won a Pulitzer Prize, but at the same time, fierce criticism (bashing akin to cynicism) erupted, asking, “Why didn’t he put down the camera and help the girl?”. The overwhelming absurdity of “famine” the girl faced was somehow replaced by a different debate about “the morality of the photographer who took this picture”. People all over the world “critiqued” the tragedy through newspapers (windows) from their safe homes. Carter later took his own life.
• The Entertainment of Public Executions (Historical Background)
• Once, an execution was supposed to be a solemn ritual of “executing justice by the law,” but in reality, it was entertainment for the masses. At public executions from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, spectators would gather with boxed lunches and enjoy laughing and jeering at the dying agonies of the criminals. At the exact moment a single human being faces the ultimate absurdity of “death,” the surrounding bystanders consumed it not by sharing the terror, but as entertainment to confirm their superiority that they were “not the ones being killed”.
• The Murder of Kitty Genovese (1964)
• This is the incident that led to the proposal of the “bystander effect” in psychology. When a woman was attacked by a thug on the streets of New York, even though many neighbors heard her screams and witnessed it from their windows, no one called the police (as it was reported at the time). The residents were looking at the tragedy from their very own “third-floor windows” as a “noise” disturbing their peaceful night. The cold silence of “Someone else will do it” or “I don’t want to get involved” erased the only chance the woman had to be saved.

When Schmar (the culprit) killed Wese (the victim), he tried to confront him with the world’s truth that “happiness breaks easily”. However, the moment Pallas answered cynically, “I saw it all,” the tragedy was downgraded to a “show to satisfy Pallas”.

6. Who is the Most Insane?

What Pallas witnessed was not just the moment of the murder. He had “silently watched everything”. From the moment Schmar was excitedly brandishing his dagger and lying in wait, Pallas was “simply looking down, shaking his head”. When Wese walked from the alley over there and stopped in the moonlight, why didn’t he shout, “Watch out, run!”?. He tacitly approved of everything and wanted to be a witness to the incident. He made his appearance only after seeing that the murder was over and his own safety was guaranteed, condemning Schmar while pretending to be an ally of justice. When testifying to the police, he will likely say, “I didn’t even have time to stop it”. On the surface, he feigns justice, but internally, he is no different from a bloodthirsty murderer. By watching a tragedy carried out by someone else without getting his own hands dirty, he satisfies the cruel urges in his heart. — If you were standing at that third-floor window, would you raise your voice? Or would you continue to look down in silence?

🎧[Audiobook & Commentary Video] The reading and deep commentary on Kafka’s “A Fratricide,” the theme of this piece, are available on YouTube (Midnight Audiobooks). Please experience the “madness of the bystander” depicted by Kafka through sound and video. 👉

https://youtu.be/eJpC9HL8UiE

Please let us know your thoughts on the “third-floor window” in the comments section!