Like many short stories, this one is confusing. But since it's so short, a little goofy, and leaves enough hints to piece together possible meanings, it was amusing. Am I reading about a rat or a human? Is the maze and its doors real or metaphorical? I've read some dystopian classics recently, so I also wonder if maybe this story is set in a future and humans really do participate in laboratory "rat" scenarios. If so, why?

I then read the other reviews about this story and I was inclined to read it again. Indeed, now I can see how it's a metaphor for life choices--religion, romance, the dream house in the country--make one hopeful enough to "jump" at doors that, turns out, were never to open. Only the author doesn't make this out to be life itself simply not working about because not everything does, he attributes these doors to open at the will of the "Professor". After all, he trains people to jump at doors that open until he deems it time to not open the door when the jump. Then people are disheartened. The doors stop opening. People stop believing in possibilities and become easily manipulated. Rats.

That's a lot to get out of 2000 words, a good chunk of which were red herring nonsense like, "The names were tex and frequently koid. Or they were flex and oid or they were duroid sand or flexsan duro, but everything was glass but not quite glass and the thing that you touched the surface, washable, crease-resistant was rubber, only it wasn't quite rubber and you didn't quite touch it but almost." I have no idea what that and other's like it are supposed to mean. ( )

Strange little story about the Pavlovian nature of life. ( )

This very short novella is an extremely rich work of literature!
It is a dazing trip inside the maze of confusion, frustration, despair, and alienation in the narrator's mind. He is describing how the filthy urban life has poisoned his psyche. (Spoilers ahead!)

He draws the comparison between modern man, and an experimental laboratory rat! Humans, in this technological world, like rats, are drawn to behave in controlled ways as to suffer to get their needs like a rat getting an electric shock and still knocking on the door to food.
The doors to religion, science, and love have failed the narrator. h would like to go back to nature, while knowing that they will change that door as well.
THEY stands for the Professor in control, and for the all-knowing superior Madame. I felt they are metaphors for God and the mother figure, respectively. ( )