The Tunnel

Description

William Frederick Kohler, a distinguished Midwestern professor in his fifties, has finished a monumental study of guilt and innocence in Hitler’s Germany but cannot write its introduction. Instead, he begins a secret account of himself as a historian, replacing scholarly order with repetition, concealment, grievance, memory, love, and hatred. He hides the unruly manuscript inside his completed history so that his wife will not discover it. Meanwhile, in the basement, he physically digs a tunnel, turning excavation into both private project and governing metaphor. As Kohler burrows through earth and his own past, the novel examines how intellectual authority can coexist with resentment and how the forces condemned in public history may persist as fascism within the heart.

Themes