The Tunnel (novel)
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Second edition cover
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| Author | William H. Gass |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Postmodern, Metafiction |
| Publisher | Knopf |
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Publication date
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February 21, 1995 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 652 (depending on edition) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 33403165 |
The Tunnel is William H. Gass's 1995 magnum opus that took 26 years to write and earned him the American Book Award of 1996. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award.
The Tunnel is the work of William Frederick Kohler, a professor of history at an unnamed university in the American Midwest. Kohler's introduction to his major work on World War II, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, the culmination of his years studying the aspects of the Nazi regime in the scope of its causes and effects, turns into The Tunnel, a brutally honest and subjective depiction of his own life and history and the opposite of the well-argued, researched and objective book he has just completed. When the harsh reality of his work begins to dawn on him, he fears that his wife, Martha, will stumble onto his papers and read his most personal (and cruel) descriptions of his and their life. Because of this fear, he hides the pages of The Tunnel inside of Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany. During this time, he starts to dig a tunnel underneath the basement of his home, eventually hiding the dirt inside the drawers of his wife's collection of antique furniture.
In 2006 Dalkey Archive Press released an audiobook of the complete novel read by the author (in 2005 in St. Louis). The accompanying booklet prints Gass's overview of the novel's contents, structure, plot, "condition of the text", aim, cast, levels of organization, issues, and other matters.
The Tunnel's 652 pages are divided into twelve main sections. In a 1995 radio interview at KRCW with Michael Rosenblatt, Gass stated that the difficulty of the novel's early sections, which are introduced by a quote from Anaxagoras ("The descent to hell is the same from every place"), serve as both a false beginning to The Tunnel (the introduction Kohler is writing and his digging project) and as a test for the reader: "I think this is a standard modernist thing, but what it is is to make sure that the person who gets into the book is ready and deserves to be there. It's a kind of a test of competency [...] It's also, I think, essential, to, fairly early, establish the kind of range of reference, of demand, that the book is going to make of the reader. I think that's just fair."
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