Narrative
Fraulein Else
Fräulein Else
Arthur Schnitzler · 1924
Opening lines
»Du willst wirklich nicht mehr weiterspielen, Else?« – »Nein, Paul, ich kann nicht mehr. Adieu. – Auf Wiedersehen, gnädige Frau.«
“You really don't want to play any longer, Else?” “No, Paul, I can't go on. Adieu. Goodbye, madam.”
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from zeno.org
Synopsis
In a holiday hotel in the Trentino, a nineteen-year-old Viennese girl receives an express letter from her mother: her father, a lawyer, has embezzled funds entrusted to him and will be arrested if no one advances the sum. A wealthy art dealer who knows the family is staying in the same hotel. Else goes to see him, and he sets his condition.
Context
The text stays from beginning to end inside the head of its character, with no narrator: a technique its author had used twenty-four years earlier for an army officer, and which he takes up again here. The first drafts were in the third person; the interior monologue was chosen only in 1921. The story appeared in October 1924 in the Neue Rundschau, then in book form from Paul Zsolnay the following month.
Who it is for
About a hundred pages that can be read in one sitting, and are better read that way: the effect of the narrative depends on the continuity of the monologue.
Prizes and reception
A great success: seventy thousand copies sold before the end of the decade; adapted as a silent film as early as 1929 by Paul Czinner.
Sources for this page 11
The pages consulted to check this page.