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According to Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka's experiments with animality epitomise the responsibility of the artist: 'either stop writing, or write like a rat'. The present essay examines how modernist writing tackles this strange responsibility. The first section provides a brief synopsis of facts and fictions about rats, focusing on the animals' association with the networks of modernity; a further section examines the role of rats in Freud's case history of the Rat Man; and the conclusion discusses the role of the rat in modernist writing, particularly in the works of Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, and Beckett.