The image of Odradek in F. Kafka's short story “The cares of the family man”

The article is devoted to the study of one of the most mysterious images of European literature, a character named Odradek from F. Kafka’s short story “The Cares of the Family Man”. The author of the article examines various hypotheses about the genesis of the image, put forward over the past hundred years by literary critics and philosophers, and offers her own version based on the text and facts of F. Kafka’s biography. F. Kafka’s passion for Kabbalah, the works of Plato and the writings of F. Nietzsche form the basis of the interpretation, according to which Odradek is the personification of the Kabbalistic teaching and the model of the Universe described in it, and the narrator, the “family man”, is God, looking at incomplete and deformed reflection of his creation with bewilderment and anxiety. The name “Odradek” is nothing more than an incomplete anagram of the word “dodecahedron” (here we can see Kafka’s irony over the desire of Kabbalists to approach God by rearranging letters in words): according to Plato and Kabbalah, the Creator created the Universe in the form of a dodecahedron, which was later used for “embroidery” of the celestial constellations. That is why Odradek is a spool wrapped in multi-colored threads. The tree that, according to the narrator, constitutes the nature of Odradek is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life; the laughter of Odradek is the rustle of turning pages of manuscripts; his unwillingness to answer questions is a Kabbalistic attitude to avoid both questions and answers; the absence of a fixed place of residence is a bitter irony both over the absence of homeland for the Jews and the absence of homeland for the esoteric texts they created; the staircase that Odradek uses to descend to people is the Kabbalistic Jacob’s Ladder. An important point in the proposed interpretation is the allusion to the “Die frohliche Wissenschaft” by F. Nietzsche: God in “The Cares of the Family Man” knows that in the future He may “die” in the minds of people, and sadly thinks that the Kabbalistic teaching that does not reflect Him, nor His Plan, in the end, alas, will be able to survive Him