The Tunnel by William Gass

Published 1995 · 651 pages · 326,939 words · about 52 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Postmodern Fiction, Experimental Fiction

How hard is The Tunnel to read?

The Tunnel scores 85 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 82 out of 100
Gass deploys archaic terms, Latin tags (quam diu, flautus vocis), German phrases, specialist historical vocabulary, and typographic neologisms (undermynes, liptip) across a single paragraph without pause. The prose switches registers from the clinical to the obscene, from the philosophical to the slangy, demanding a reader capable of moving between Kantian terminology and crude sexual idiom on the same page. Comparable to Gravity's Rainbow in lexical range, though the vocabulary serves psychological self-excavation rather than encyclopedic display.
Sentence structure: 88 out of 100
Sentences in The Tunnel oscillate between single-word percussions — tat. stopped. tat. — and coiling Faulknerian periods that cascade across multiple pages with embedded subordinate clauses, interrupting asides, lists that accumulate without resolution. Within a single paragraph, Gass may pass through six different syntactic registers: diary fragment, academic prose, confessional admission, typographic play, limerick, and Nazi document excerpt. The effect approaches Absalom, Absalom! in its demands, with the added destabilization of mid-sentence form shifts.
Abstraction: 83 out of 100
Kohler philosophizes on sincerity, empiricism, classicism, and the ontology of guilt while simultaneously confessing his sexual history and describing the mechanics of tunnel digging. The book's philosophical content — sustained meditations on history, language, self-deception, and fascism — is never separated from its psychological and autobiographical material; they are the same substance viewed differently. Long passages operate as philosophical essays (on SINCERITY, EMPIRICISM, CLASSICISM, each headed with typeset labels) embedded inside a confessional novel, placing the abstraction level above 2666 and approaching The Brothers Karamazov.
Information density: 88 out of 100
Every section of the text layers at minimum three simultaneous registers: Kohler's inner confession, historical documentation (Nazi diaries, Goebbels excerpts), and embedded cultural allusion (Rilke, Gide, Woolf, Proust, Heine). The typographic experiments, interpolated limericks, numbered paragraphs, and fragmentary headers add further informational layers. The reader must track Kohler's academic identity, his personal history, his marriage, his tunnel, his colleagues, and his relationship to Hitler's Germany simultaneously — a density approaching Ulysses in the concentration of meaning per page.
Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100
Kohler explicitly names himself a liar on nearly every page, acknowledging that he modifies, confabulates, and withholds as he writes. The book contains no conventional plot: events are reported only through Kohler's unreliable self-examination, and the reader must read against his self-justifications to understand what he has actually done. His relationship to Lou, his colleagues, his family, and his conduct in Nazi Germany all require reconstruction from admissions buried in rhetorical evasions — a more aggressive version of the indirection in Lolita.
Symbolic density: 85 out of 100
The tunnel Kohler digs beneath his house is the novel's governing symbol: his psyche, the underside of history, the fascism of the heart, the death-drive, the womb, the grave. The Party of the Disappointed People (PdP) that Kohler fantasizes functions as a precise allegorical diagram of how fascism emerges from personal resentment. The act of writing — hiding his manuscript in the pages of his academic book — mirrors the tunnel's concealment and the entire novel's argument about what lies beneath official history.
Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
Gass maintains radical ironic distance from Kohler throughout: Kohler's self-justifications are transparently monstrous, his philosophical sophistication deployed to avoid rather than reach self-knowledge. Yet the prose is so seductively beautiful — so clearly the product of genuine literary intelligence — that the reader is implicated in enjoying it. The irony works structurally: Kohler's academic book exonerates Germany while his secret book reveals how fascism lives in every disappointed person, including the reader. The distance is closer to Pale Fire than to the more legible irony of The Great Gatsby.
Resolution withholding: 90 out of 100
The tunnel has no destination and the novel offers none. The introduction to Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany is never written. The PdP remains a private fantasy. Childhood traumas are returned to obsessively but never integrated. The novel ends not with resolution but with the continuation of digging — Kohler will go on, the tunnel will go on, the confession will continue without arriving anywhere. The withholding is structural rather than accidental, approaching the deliberate irresolution of Waiting for Godot and Infinite Jest.
Structural complexity: 90 out of 100
The Tunnel embeds at least six distinct textual forms within its frame: Kohler's confessional manuscript, excerpts from Nazi diaries and Goebbels entries, typographic prose poems with fragmented syntax, Culp's limericks (a running mock-epic history of the human race), philosophical essays marked with labeled headers, and Kohler's academic prose. Time moves non-linearly between 1930s Germany, wartime, postwar Nuremberg, and the novel's present in Indiana, without clear demarcation. The structure is closer to Ulysses in formal variety than to conventionally complex novels like Midnight's Children.

How The Tunnel is regarded

The Tunnel holds a literary regard score of 75 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where The Tunnel sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (665 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Tunnel scores 90 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
I am, myself, an outsize malevolent geegaw.
Symbol: Literal & Descriptive
Our study, gentlemen, the study of history, is really a study of language.
Mythos: Irony and Satire vi (irony vi)
I’ve done nothing except fill her drawers with dirt.
Genre: Anatomy + Confession
This sort of thing—confession—this father-forgive-me stuff—is not in my line.

Where the story of The Tunnel takes place

  • Midwestern Indiana university town, Vietnam years (1967 to 1971), the main setting
  • Grand, Iowa and the Ohio steel valley: Depression and dust-bowl childhood (1928 to 1938)
  • Nazi Germany university town, Tabor's lectures and Kristallnacht (1934 to 1938)
  • First Army in France and the Nuremberg trials (1944 to 1946)

5 things that are true of The Tunnel, with the passage for each

  1. Kohler begins by meaning to write an introduction to his work on the Germans, but cannot.

    It was my intention, when I began, to write an introduction to my work on the Germans.

  2. He hides his secret pages between the pages of his official manuscript.

    I shall slide them between the pages of my manuscript.

  3. The tunnel roof collapses on him while he digs.

    the earth above me turned soft and fell like plop on my head, shoulders, and half-chest

  4. He kills his wife's cat in the tunnel and ends up with its body.

    I had a dead cat on my hands just the same.

  5. Martha empties a drawer of his dirt onto his manuscript, ending his secret.

    tipped the entire drawer over my manuscript, forming not exactly a hill, rather more a mound of earth, on top of my table.

Scenes in The Tunnel that Frye would name

58 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Sparagmos, untitled
Some of the dead have not yet died. The mass grave at Dubno presents the body of a people in heaps.
Katabasis, untitled
Today I began to dig; took my first bite of the earth; put in my first pick. The literal beginning of the tunnel.
Katabasis, untitled
The descent to hell is the same from every place. The epigraph sets the book as a descent.
Confession, untitled
This sort of thing—confession—this father-forgive-me stuff—is not in my line. Kohler names and disclaims the register he is writing in.
Anagnorisis, untitled
it was, as it always is of course . . . complicity. Kohler recognizes that his watching is complicity.
Alazon, untitled
somebody born in Fort Wayne wanting to be Viennese Planmantee as the impostor-pedant.

Books that share these scenes with The Tunnel

About the author

William Gass