After spending the past seven years writing The Portable Veblen, a novel in which a squirrel plays a significant part, I can’t help but feel solidarity with the mystical, diabolical, ignoble and sublime squirrels that can be found in literary roles of all kinds. Here are a few of my favourites.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

As Professor Pnin bumbles about Waindell College, he is often shadowed by a squirrel, which, scholars agree, seems to serve as either psychic doppelganger or phantom of Pnin’s first love, murdered at Buchenwald, Mira Belochkin (whose name is close to the Russian for squirrel).

‘An Appointment’ by WB Yeats

Yeats invoked animals often, and squirrels more than once (see also: “To a Squirrel at Kyle-na-gno”). The observer in this poem admires the freedom of the “proud, wayward squirrel” and takes much satisfaction in the furry maverick’s shrug at human delusions of rank. “No government appointed him.”

Kafka’s later notebooks

Kafka’s animal fables often embrace the grotesque – scholar Egon Schwartz calls them “indices of an obsessed, nightmarish, anti-utopian world, which is increasingly the one in which we now live.” Yet this is how Kafka wrote about a squirrel: “It was a squirrel, it was a squirrel, a wild female nutcracker, a jumper, a climber, and her bushy tail was famous in all the forests. This squirrel, this squirrel was always travelling, always searching, it couldn’t talk about this, not because it lacked the power of speech but because it had absolutely no time.” The squirrel here seems like a symbol of dignity to a man dying of tuberculosis who must have felt he too was running out of time.

The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin by Beatrix Potter

The message of this beloved story is that if you step out of line you’ll pay the consequences. No wonder children squirm with delighted terror over Nutkin’s insouciance and maddening riddles.

Frederick Nietzsche, biographical detail

According to his sister Elizabeth in The Young Nietzsche, the youthful Fritz worshipped a porcelain squirrel he named King Squirrel I and honoured it with musical productions, plays and poetry. Thus Spake Eichhörnchen!

A Diamond as Big as the Ritz by F Scott Fitzgerald

A hunted squirrel leads to the discovery of the massive diamond at the heart of this satirical novella about American excess and materialism – and is never thanked or mentioned again. A telling example of how the agency of the squirrel is simply taken for granted.

‘St Peter’s Day’ by Anton Chekhov

This story of the most foolish and blundering hunting party ever to assemble reaches its climax when one of the louts knocks a large ground squirrel over the head and suggests a dissection. After a swift butchering, the animal is declared to be without a heart. The sacrifice suggests the heartlessness and idiocy of mankind.

This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff

A squirrel who is an innocent bystander serves as a scapegoat. In this classic memoir, young Mr Wolff (Jack) has obtained a rifle, and, in the lonely hours after school, pretends to assassinate hapless neighbours from his window. Angry that the fools are failing to recognise the danger they’re in, he instead shoots a squirrel off the telephone wire. Later, concealing from his tender mother that he is the killer (“Poor little thing,” she says), Jack identifies with his victim in helpless sobs.

Small Game by John Blades

In this lost gem, published in the early 1990s, the squirrel is portrayed as a demon figure who creates havoc and discord. An everyman projects his woes on to the squirrels that he must destroy if he is to survive. Blades echoes Carl Jung’s theories of shadow projection and draws on the figure of Ratatoskr, a malicious trickster in Norse mythology.

‘On Pragmatism’ by William James

The squirrel in this case is used as a prop at the dawn of pragmatism and ordinary language philosophy; the anecdote related by Professor James in his famous lecture annoys Veblen, the title character of my novel, no end. He describes a camping trip with a cohort of his brainy friends, where, beneath a large tree in the “unlimited leisure” of the wilderness, the heavy metaphysical question in dispute is this: does the man, in going round the tree, go round the rotating squirrel on the tree – or not? Veblen thinks the Brahmins are splitting hairs about the words “go around”, while a squirrel is taking care not to be roasted on a spit for dinner. Since when is this “unlimited leisure”? According to Veblen, even James, the great empathist, had his blind spots.