Duna's unicycle

Duna’s unicycle is the bear’s defining circus prop and a recurring measure of his skill, dependence, decline, and lost dignity. It first appears as an uncanny object outside a dark bathroom at Pension Grillparzer, then becomes the means through which Duna performs, shows off, and expresses a talent that eventually deserts him. Its course tracks the bear’s changing life: from private nighttime practice to public spectacle, and finally to a failed attempt at renewal in the zoo.

First Appearance at Pension Grillparzer

The unicycle is first noticed parked against the wall outside the W.C. while the narrator’s family is staying at Pension Grillparzer. Inside, the toilet keeps flushing before its tank can refill. Looking beneath the door, the narrator sees huge, clawless bear’s feet and furry shins suspended above the floor. The detail turns an ordinary bathroom into a puzzle: the bear is not a person in costume but a real animal, apparently housebroken, whose presence is announced by the unicycle waiting outside.

The mystery breaks into the hallway when the narrator’s father opens a door and falls on the narrator. The commotion knocks the unicycle against the W.C. door; Duna emerges, stumbles over it, and lunges to regain his balance. He picks it up in his front paws and calls out. A woman arrives looking for him, and the bear soon balances on the wheel with one enormous paw resting on her shoulder. The vehicle is at once a circus implement and part of the bear’s domestic routine: Duna practices at night despite being forbidden to do so, and his companion apologizes for the disturbance because he loves his work.

Skill, Performance, and Friction

Duna’s riding is more than a startling trick. As he pedals down the hallway, he has good balance but rides carelessly, brushing the walls and touching photographs of speed-skating teams with his paws. The unicycle brings his animal body into contact with the pension’s human interiors, making him an awkward performer in a space where ordinary household rules still apply. The photographs need straightening after he has gone by, and the woman follows him calling his name.

The following morning, Duna rides outside on the sidewalk under the woman’s supervision. The law requires that he be on a leash, but the narrator recognizes how little control it provides while the bear moves lazily from parking meter to parking meter, sometimes leaning a paw on a meter to turn. His skill is apparent, yet the scene also makes its limit visible: he seems to have reached a dead end in unicycling. The same act that draws attention cannot offer him a path beyond its narrow circle.

During another visit, Duna pedals up to the narrator and hands over the car keys, an unconventional gesture that the manager, Herr Theobald, remarks not everyone would welcome. At a parking meter, the bear licks its little glass face and holds on for support. When his companion tugs his leash, Duna at first pedals listlessly in place, then begins to ride with conspicuous energy, veering among the meters and showing off for his audience. The unicycle turns restraint into display: what begins with the leash and a command becomes a performance that the bear seems to take into his own paws.

That performance ends in a collision with a parked car. Duna rides too close to the curb, and the wheel pitches him hard into the car’s fender. He is not injured, but he sits on the sidewalk looking embarrassed; nobody laughs. His companion crouches beside him, wipes saliva from the fur near his mouth, and gently reproves him. Duna pushes her hand away and will not look at her. The fall is both a comic mishap and a brief exposure of the vulnerability behind the show: the unicycle can display his control, but it can also betray him in front of an audience.

Decline and Loss of the Talent

After Herr Theobald’s death, the unicycle appears in a more ominous scene. Theobald has gone into the hall to investigate what he believes is a prowler and finds Duna dressed in the pin-striped suit left behind by the pension’s resident dreamer, pedaling in the dark. The sight of the sullen bear in the discarded clothes is enough to frighten Theobald to death. The passage does not explain why the woman dressed Duna in the suit; it leaves the image, with the unicycle, as an unexplained and fatal encounter between two of the pension’s damaged lives.

As responsibility for managing the failing pension falls more heavily on Theobald’s sister, she has less time for Duna. The bear grows senile and increasingly difficult to manage. After he bullies a mailman down a marble staircase and breaks the man’s hip, an old ordinance against unrestrained animals in public places is enforced, and Duna is outlawed from the pension. The unicycle cannot protect him from the consequences of his behavior or from the rules governing where he may live.

Duna is kept in a courtyard cage, where dogs and children taunt him and residents drop food, and worse, into his enclosure. He becomes cunning, sometimes pretending to sleep, and eats most of someone’s cat. Poisoned twice, he grows afraid to eat. The unicycle, once a familiar means of work and movement, offers no escape from this hostile setting. The bear is eventually donated to Schönbrunn Zoo despite doubts about whether the toothless, ill animal, perhaps contagious, can be accepted. His long history of being treated as a human being has not prepared him for the zoo’s gentler routine.

The Failed Return and Its Meaning

Duna’s courtyard sleeping quarters have worsened his rheumatism, and by the time he reaches the zoo even his sole talent is beyond recovery. When he first tries the unicycle there, he falls. Someone laughs, and Theobald’s sister explains that after anyone laughed at something Duna did, he would never do that thing again. The sequence makes the audience’s response consequential: a fall is not simply a failed trick but the point at which the bear’s old performance becomes impossible. The unicycle, once the sign of a gift that drew spectators, is now the measure of a capacity that cannot be restored.

Duna becomes a charity case at the zoo and dies two months after arriving. Theobald’s sister attributes his death to mortification: a rash spreads across his chest, which must be shaved, and a zoo official says that a shaved bear is embarrassed to death. The account’s grotesque, uncertain explanation echoes the earlier scene of the bear falling before a laughing audience. It also refuses to reduce the unicycle to a cheerful circus image. Its meaning changes with Duna’s circumstances, from evidence of a practiced skill to a reminder of his exclusion, frailty, and exposure to other people’s amusement.

After Duna’s death, the narrator looks into the empty courtyard cage. The unicycle is absent; in its place, the bear’s ossified droppings remain in a corner, compared to lifeless corpses preserved at Pompeii. The narrator thinks of Robo, and notes that there are more remains of the bear. The missing vehicle sharpens the contrast between the bear’s former visible performance and the material residue left behind. As a recurring object, Duna’s unicycle gives the story a concrete way to register that loss: it survives in memory as the instrument of a talent that once seemed to define him, but it cannot follow him into the final silence.