Rats

The Rats are the creatures Franz Biberkopf encounters as his consciousness sinks toward death at Buch. They welcome him into a life beneath the earth, where he can burrow and live beyond the burdens of the human body. Yet the animal world they offer is not simply an escape: as Franz begins to return, he searches the mouse-holes and calls their inhabitants back into his service. Their changing place in the scene makes them a vivid measure of his movement from self-erasure toward renewed participation in life.

The Mice at Buch

The book places the grey mice in a nest between the secure house and the Buch main building, with the store-room above them. Their position is at once specific and liminal: they occupy the space between the institution sustaining Franz’s body and the life of the fields outside. While Franz lies insensible, his soul seems to leave the human shell in brief, uncertain movements, searching and whispering before returning to the still-breathing body. The mice understand him when ordinary human consciousness appears barely present. The narrative thus grants the small animals a capacity for recognition and companionship at the precise moment when Franz is least able to inhabit his human identity.

Their welcome is practical as well as sympathetic. They invite Franz to eat with them, ask what troubles him, and urge him to put an end to his suffering. Their attention does not promise a cure or a return to human society; instead, it offers a different kind of existence, organized around food, shelter, and animal company. The scene shifts the question from whether Franz can resume his former life to whether life in a human body is bearable at all.

An Animal Alternative to Human Life

In the mice’s company, Franz imagines becoming a field mouse. He says, “It is not good to live in a human body, I’ll crouch below the earth instead, run across the fields and eat whatever I find, and the wind will blow, and the rain will fall, and the cold will come and go, that’s better than living in a human body.” The imagined alternative is not comfortable or protected: it includes weather, exposure, and the need to find food. Its attraction lies instead in leaving the human body and its suffering behind. Franz would exchange human life for a creature’s existence among earth, fields, wind, rain, and cold.

The mice reinforce that rejection by describing the human being as repugnant, even worse than cats. Their judgment reverses the usual hierarchy in which animals are measured against humanity: here, human beings are the degraded creatures, and the mouse’s life offers a possible refuge. The scene does not establish the mice as a literal rescue party. Their conversation belongs to the strange, inwardly charged account of Franz’s soul, but it gives the animal figures a distinct role within that experience: they welcome him, question him, and make the prospect of abandoning human existence imaginable.

Franz joins them in the image, running about and burrowing as a field mouse. Meanwhile, the body remains in bed in the secure house. Doctors sustain it, but Franz fades, and they say they can no longer keep him alive. The contrast is stark: the human body is maintained by medical care while the creature that was within it runs through the fields. The Rats belong to this separation between a failing body and a soul represented as mobile, animal, and outside the institution.

From Burrow to Return

The animal imagery changes as something begins to leave Franz and move through the fields. It searches among grasses and enters the earth, where plants conceal their roots and seeds. The passage describes Franz’s soul as returning living seeds to the earth, though the ground is cold and frozen and their chances of taking root are uncertain. The mice and mouse-holes are part of this underground landscape, but the movement is no longer simply Franz’s flight into animal life. His dispersing soul becomes a source of seeds, carrying something outward even as the body continues to decline.

Later, after Franz has heard the slow song of Death and lies rigid with his eyes shut, the narrative presents a turn that other people cannot see. He calls together what belongs to him and moves through the windows into the fields. He shakes the grasses and creeps into the mouse-holes, demanding, “Out, out, what have we here, is anything of mine here?” He tells what he finds to get out and insists that he needs them for work. The Rats’ burrows, once an imagined destination away from human existence, have become places Franz searches in order to gather what he claims as his own.

This reversal gives the mice’s earlier invitation a new significance. They had offered Franz a way to abandon the human body; in the later vision, he does not simply remain in their world. He calls its inhabitants out of concealment and directs their movement toward a task. The change is not narrated as a simple recovery: Franz is still lying motionless, and the field journey is hidden from the people around him. But the contrast between his earlier wish to burrow with the mice and his later summons of them marks a change in direction. The animals remain central to the imagery of his passage, now associated with his effort to reclaim rather than surrender what belongs to him.

Narrative Significance

The Rats give Franz’s near-death experience an animal perspective without reducing the scene to ordinary observation. Their nest, invitation, and burrows provide concrete places for a crisis otherwise expressed through the soul’s uncertain departures from the body. In their company, the wish to escape humanity takes an unmistakable form: to crouch underground, forage, and endure the weather as a field creature. The mice are companions in that fantasy, not merely symbols attached from outside it.

At the same time, the scene refuses to leave the animal world as a final refuge. The account of seeds passing into the fields and Franz’s later search through the grass and mouse-holes gives the same landscape a second function. What first appears as a route away from human life becomes ground through which Franz gathers and calls back his scattered resources. The Rats therefore accompany both withdrawal and return. Their movement from welcoming him into their world to being summoned by him preserves the strangeness of Franz’s transformation while making its change of direction legible.