This undergraduate honours thesis explores American writer William H. Gass’ “The Tunnel” (1995), positing that the notoriously dense and difficult work can be interpreted through three new critical avenues: as a Leibnizian monad, in dialogue with Tadeusz Borowski’s short-story collection “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” (1946/1967), and as engaging with issues central to the historiographical theories of Johan Gottfried von Herder and Leopold von Ranke.