Yuan Gao, Yaqi Mo

Yuan Gao, Yaqi Mo

Oct. 30, 2026

Robert Walser, The writing of the sense of shame,

Robert Walser’s late novel fragment The Robber, composed during his Bern period, contains a distinctive and sustained phenomenon that may be called the writing of the “sense of shame”. Taking The Robber as its central object of analysis, this article systematically examines three dimensions of Walser’s writing of the sense of shame. The study first clarifies the concept of the sense of shame, which denotes an active, preventive withdrawal and a sustained concealment. It then interprets, from three perspectives—the Robber’s rebellion against imposed identities, the mechanisms of social isolation, and the novel’s circuitous mode of narration—the ways in which the protagonist’s social and aesthetic identities are concealed, showing how concealment itself becomes a poetic principle and how the sense of shame assumes the function of constructing both identity and text. The study finds that Walser’s writing of the sense of shame is not merely a description of an individual’s social situation but a profound testimony to the crisis of subjectivity in modernity: the naming strategy of the “Robber” constitutes an appropriation of social stigma; the repeated inscription of embodied humiliation exposes the operations of power within social norms; and the narrative subject’s continual stopping on the verge of speech transforms the sense of shame into a poetic principle of ontological significance.

© 2026, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license