The Story Archive

The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr

E. T. A. Hoffmann · 1820 CE · Novel · German · Romantic

A tomcat who taught himself to read in his master's library writes up his education, his love affairs and his views on genius, using the pages of a printed life of the composer Johannes Kreisler as blotting paper. The printer sets both manuscripts together, so the cat's account of his own excellence breaks off mid-sentence into Kreisler at a shabby German court and resumes wherever the waste sheets ran out. Hoffmann died with it unfinished, having taken the digressive self-editing manner from Sterne.

Open The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.

Lineage

Attributes

Genre
Theme
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Mode / tone
Culture / tradition

Closest analogues