franz kafka essay

Friday essay: ‘All I am is literature’ – Franz Kafka’s diaries were the forge of his writing

Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, RMIT University

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Picture the scene. It is the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, before the Great War changed such scenes forever. A young man with sound prospects is to meet his fiancée’s father for the first time.

The convention of the day would require him to lay out his credentials and his family’s pedigree for the match to proceed agreeably. But in response to the imagined and real interrogation, both of which generate feelings of guilt and shame about his intentions, the young man instead declares to his prospective father-in-law, by way of a letter: “All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.”

The Diaries – Franz Kafka, translated by Ross Benjamin (Shocken)

Franz Kafka (1884-1924) was nearly 30 years old and engaged to Felice Bauer when he made this exorbitant claim. It was the first of three engagements: twice to Felice and later, quite briefly, to Julie Wohryzek. The decision to put his thoughts in a letter was entirely consistent with the epistolary nature of his relationship with Felice. They saw each other infrequently during their four years together.

Notably, Franz did not declare to Herr Bauer: “I am a lawyer working for a workers’ insurance company, but my real passion is fiction writing.” Nor did he say: “I have a responsible and reasonably well-paying day job, but spend my nights writing stories in my parents’ apartment in Prague where I live.” Missing was the schmoozing of: “Literature is my primary interest – along with your daughter, of course.”

Each of these statements would have been true, although none would have struck the same kind of truth as his actual declaration – to himself as much as to his addressee – that he was, as he wrote in his diary, “nothing but literature”.

The letter to Herr Bauer never arrived. Felice intercepted it.

Uncanny writing

What Kafka expresses in the letter is a commitment to something other than a life to be lived and shared with Felice, something other than what today would be called a lifestyle. As his dairies repeatedly show, Kafka’s life, his existence, was literature, and that existence was not shareable as a “lived experience”.

He was often in pain, fatigued, or simply distressed by his body’s puniness. He despaired of the obligations of family life, the noisiness and nosiness of his parents and siblings. He was deeply conflicted by the necessity to undertake the paid work that sapped his energy. Each of these things he saw as challenges, counter forces, to his writing.

Yet this hardworking, clever, funny and eventually chronically ill young man was not a hermit. He had friends, admirers, colleagues and lovers aplenty.

Kafka’s sensibility was aslant to the conventions of bourgeois life, but it chimed with a certain European modernity that was, around that time, expressing its disenchantment with the world. His existence was entirely directed towards what was, for him, both the necessary and the uncanny nature of writing.

For Kafka, writing was a strange way of thinking and being in the world. It was a force to which he could only submit, an existence that joined up with and tore away from his own. It was so much more than a mode of expression. It was more than an activity undertaken to build the kind of literary legacy that his friend and fellow writer Max Brod (1884-1968) desired for him.

Felice and her father each recognised this paradoxical relation to life in Kafka. In his diaries, describing the “tribunal” where his engagement to Felice was broken for the first time, Kafka noted: “Her father grasps it correctly from all sides.”

Kafka’s literary legacy

In 1917, Kafka was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him just before his 41st birthday. The small number of stories he published during his lifetime amounted to no more than 300 or so pages. The most well-known are The Judgement (1913), The Stoker (1913), The Metamorphosis (1915) and In the Penal Colony (1919).

Brod became Kafka’s literary executor. He managed the posthumous publication of his friend’s three incomplete novels The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and The Man Who Disappeared (1927) – also known by the title Amerika. He also took possession of the 12 notebooks that constitute Kafka’s “diaries”, bundles of papers, and some letters.

Kafka’s instructions were to burn the lot. Brod’s refusal has long been the subject of speculation.

Perhaps more than those of any other published writer, the diaries of Franz Kafka have a special value in providing insight into his modest but profound literary output. Ross Benjamin’s new translation of Kafka’s dairies makes available the German critical edition published in 1990, which corrected the elisions, amendments and misrepresentations in the edition Brod published as two volumes in 1948 and 1949.

What a joy it is to read Kafka disentangled from Brod’s oversight. But why was he entangled in the first place? Kafka was hardly a household name during the mere 15 years he was publishing, beginning with The Aeroplanes at Brescia, which appeared in the Prague newspaper Bohemia in 1909. It was another four years before his short fiction began to appear in print.

Kafka was aware of the limited interest in his writing beyond a small group of loyal supporters, at the centre of which was Brod. This was confirmed in an embarrassing episode when the well-known Czech writer Carl Sternheim, with whom Kafka shared a publisher, was awarded a literary prize, but directed his publisher to hand the prize money over to Kafka on the presumption that Kafka was impoverished.

Kafka initially refused the money because he felt it was being bestowed by someone unfamiliar with his work to avoid the bad optics of the prize going to an already wealthy author during wartime. Publicly, he said he was not as poor as the poorest eligible writer. Privately, he called it an act of misplaced charity, although he did eventually accept the money. Without any immediate need of it, he invested it in war bonds. It was the only literary honour Kafka would receive during his lifetime.

Kafka’s publisher Kurt Wolff was a keen supporter of his writing. But when war broke out in 1914 – just as Kafka’s writing was hitting its straps – Wolff enlisted.

The publisher to whom Wolff handed the management of his business, Georg Heinrich Meyer, was also enthusiastic about Kafka’s writing. But according to Kafka’s biographer Reiner Stach, Meyer was probably quite ignorant of its real worth. Meyer had a background in the business side of publishing; he showed little interest in cultivating relationships with authors or discussing the literary content of their work.

It thus fell to Brod to establish Kafka’s posthumous legacy as a literary genius. He ensured that few would now question Kafka’s place in the pantheon of modernist writers. But in doing so he tightly entwined his own literary reputation with that of his friend.

He did this in his own writing, first in a fictionalised account of their friendship, The Kingdom of Love (1928), in which Kafka is figured by the character Richard and Brod by the character Christof. Brod also wrote an “objective” biography of Kafka (1937), in which he states:

I lived still with my unforgettable friend […] I asked him questions and could answer myself in his name.

Brod’s writings about their friendship established a mythologised Kafka, who lived on, fictionally and biographically, through Brod’s name. His influence over Kafka’s estate was not simply one of editorially securing the works’ publication. In a short story collection, Brod included an appendix guiding readers on how to interpret the stories, believing only he held the key to unlocking the meaning of the genius’s work.

Read more: Kafka's modest output had an outsized impact on modern culture

A forge for sentences

Ross Benjamin acknowledges that Brod’s relationship with Kafka was valuable in securing an international reputation, beyond the small and enthusiastic readership he had while he was alive. But this also meant Kafka’s reception was influenced too heavily by Brod’s concern with his own reputation.

Benjamin’s new translation of Kafka’s diaries, in their presentation and arrangement, enables English readers to see them, for the first time, as the forge of his craft. It builds on the German critical edition, as well as decades of work by many scholars. We can now read in the diaries Kafka the writer rather than Kafka the author.

Restored is the sentence craft as it was being forged, smithy-like, across the 12 quarto and octavo notebooks that Kafka called his Tagebücher (diaries), written between 1909 and 1923. Restored are the frequently ungrammatical and sometimes half-legible sentences that Brod often completed or replaced with the syntax of High German. Restored are the homoerotic observations, descriptions of visits to brothels, and negative comments about well-known people, including the odd barb directed at Brod himself.

Most pleasurably, the new translation restores our sense of proximity to the pen and ink. It allows us to experience the falling off and starting again of sentences, the sometimes awkwardly expressed passages, the unreadable words due to ripped notebook pages, and the arresting effect of marooned and perfectly complete passages that are reforged across several pages.

Consider the following being hammered and shaped in the early drafting of the story Description of a Struggle:

You I said and gave him a little push with my knee (with this sudden burst of speech some saliva flew out of my mouth as a bad omen) don’t fall asleep.

The same sentence is repeated, word for word, many entries later. But on that same notebook page quotation marks are toyed with and a sentence is added:

“You” I said and gave him a little push with my knee (with this sudden burst of speech some saliva flew out of my mouth as a bad omen). I haven’t forgotten about you he said and shook his head even while opening his eyes.

In an entry that begins “He seduced a girl in a small town in Isergebirge”, we learn from the critical note attached to it – one of 1,400 meticulously detailed notes – that the passage is likely crafted from direct observation during one of Kafka’s work travels, and that it possibly builds upon an actual liaison he had with a young woman (referred to as G or W, the notes tell us) during those same travels. A little later, we read:

Nothing, nothing. In this way I make ghosts for myself. I was involved, even if only slightly, solely in the passage […] For a moment I thought I saw something real in the description of the landscape.

What matters more than the status of the seduction passage – whether it is a sliver of fiction or a sliver of Kafka’s life – is the feeling we have of being just behind Kafka’s shoulder watching him re-read and re-evaluate what he has written.

The diaries include writing in a variety of genres: descriptions of theatrical performances, recollections of dreams, fiction tryouts, reviews, observations of other people, annotations of other writers’ work, essays on various topics. Combined with the lack of signposting, the effect is that the writer’s “I” is disaggregated and distanced from the writing. Notice the displacement in this entry, for example:

A person who has no diary is in a false position in the face of a diary. When, for example, he reads in Goethe’s diary that on 11 January 1797 the latter was busy at home all day with various arrangements, it seems to this person that he himself has never done so little.

It is often unclear in the notebooks whether the “I” or the “he” that announces itself on the page is Kafka, or one of his characters, or someone he is ventriloquising. The dairies require us to suspend our familiar habit of asking who is speaking and trying to place who is being referred to. Instead, it becomes necessary to focus on the image the passage brings alive.

Read more: Friday essay: the wonder of Joyce's Ulysses

The law of the diary

It is striking to hold the two editions of Kafka’s diaries alongside each other to see how the new translation, in reclaiming the liveliness of the writing, also produces the occasional discombobulation that results from his writing practices.

Kafka frequently returned to old notebooks to make entries after new ones had been started. This criss-crossing is reproduced in the new edition, which is organised by notebook, not by year as in the Brod edition.

Reading naturally goes forward. This parallels the way we habitually think of the movement of a life and its recording in a journal. With the criss-crossing of entries across the notebooks, however, the reader’s attention needs to be sharp. Where a life or a book might move in a one-way direction, the craft of writing does not. Kafka’s notebooks reflect the flux of writing, faithfully restored in the new translation.

Maurice Blanchot tells us the only “formidable law” of the diary is that it must respect the calendar. To note the date, Blanchot says, is to record the passing of time and provide the illusion that the writer lives twice: once by warding off forgetfulness and the despair of having nothing to write; twice by noting that they are writing in their diary about having nothing to write.

Frequently, Kafka abides by this law:

Wrote nothing […] Wrote almost nothing […] Awful. Wrote nothing today. No time tomorrow.

Within a few weeks, however:

This story “The Judgment” I wrote at one stretch.

And later still:

It has become very necessary to keep a diary again.

As the notebooks start increasing, the dating falls away, transgressing Blanchot’s law completely.

Read more: Friday essay: is this the end of translation?

A new literature

Kafka’s occasional reflections on his diary-keeping are less about the personal insights, or what might be called the conscience, of the writer. They are not defined by their confessional sincerity. Rather, they enable him to self-display. The diary entries provide him with a visualisation of the movement of his thoughts and their alignment on the page.

The diaries act not only as a forge for Kafka’s writing; they also forge a new possibility for the diary’s place within literature. In several entries, Kafka comments on his intention to start an autobiography, implying he did not see the writing he was doing in the notebooks as having an autobiographical purpose.

He also makes the allusive suggestion that diary-writing has its analogue in the literature being produced by his Jewish contemporaries in Warsaw and Prague.

This new literature, Kafka says, is united by a Hebrew mother tongue assimilated within the dominant German language culture. It was a literature seeking modes of expression for the effects of that assimilation. Kafka viewed the experimental writing of his peers as a form of literature that can be viewed as the

diary keeping of a nation, which is something completely different from historiography […] the detailed spiritualization of the extensive public life, the binding of dissatisfied elements.

Diary writing can be seen as a means of self-formation, not only for an individual, but also for a “small nation” of a marginalised language culture. It offers new and uncertain modes of expression. Kafka adds:

literature is less an affair of literary history than an affair of the people […] everyone must always be prepared to know, to defend the part of literature that falls to him and at least to defend it even if he doesn’t know or bear it.

Decades later, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would mine this entry in Kafka’s diary to coin their idea of “minor literature”. They argued that major or dominant languages, such as German and English, not only produce the spoken dialects of the minority cultures they incorporate or colonise; they also enable new modes of literary expression by writers from minor cultures writing within those major languages.

Kafka spoke High German; his writing bore little or no trace of Prague-German. But this diary entry opens up the possibility of a new way of conceptualising the politics and poetics of literary expression. Such an understanding is now central to literary criticism in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Blanchot tells us there is no law without its transgression. The new version of Kafka’s strange and extraordinary diaries reminds us how diaries are not usually intended for any reader other than their writer, who is usually their only reader. Ross’s translation will continue to ensure the transgression of that law too.

It is just shy of a century since Kafka’s death. What could be more fitting than the appearance of these diaries in a faithful translation, showing them to be much more than an accompaniment to Kafka’s stories or a calendar of his existence? They are an inexhaustible source of literature itself.

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Art by Franz Kafka found in the ‘Black Notebook’ ( c 1923) and now in the National Library of Israel. Photo by Getty Images

The diaries of Kafka

By day an insurance official, by night he was an incessant, insomniacal scribe of the space between waking and dreaming.

by Ross Benjamin   + BIO

On 9 October 1911, Franz Kafka, then 28 years old, wrote in his diary that he didn’t expect to reach the age of 40. At the time of this entry, he was not yet stricken with the tuberculosis that would lead to his death in 1924, shortly before his 41st birthday. What afflicted him at that time, making him doubt his longevity, was harder to pin down. Perhaps due to this very indefiniteness, it provided raw material for his aesthetic imagination:

I’ll hardly live to be forty years old, against that prospect speaks, for example, the tension that often lies over the left half of my skull, which feels like an inner leprosy and which, when I disregard the unpleasantness and try only to contemplate it, makes the same impression on me as the sight of the skull cross sections in textbooks or as an almost painless dissection while alive, where the knife a little bit cooling, careful, often stopping and turning back, sometimes lying at rest slices paper-thin coverings into even finer divisions very close to working brain parts. – from The Diaries by Franz Kafka. This and subsequent translations by Ross Benjamin (2022).

The literary intensity with which Kafka portrayed his sense of physical malady is characteristic of his writing in his diaries, which he kept between 1909 and 1923; they offer an intimate glimpse into the transformative process by which he made even his most probing self-examination and his most agonising ordeals into a fertile source of invention. In the image of the knife piercing and cutting living flesh, and the sensuous pleasure hinted at in his description of the blade’s caresses, Kafka was shaping his distinctive sensibility and developing his repertoire.

O nce wrought, these tropes were available to be repurposed and refashioned. Untethered from their initial association with the distress of ‘an inner leprosy’, they became components of Kafka’s poetics of corporeality. In a letter to his future fiancée Felice Bauer in February 1913, Kafka accentuated his perverse gratification in visualising himself being carved by a knife:

Such are the fantasies or wishes in which I indulge when I lie sleepless in bed:

To be a coarse piece of wood and to be braced by the cook against her body as she draws the knife toward her with both hands along the side of this stiff piece of wood (that is, somewhere around the area of my hip) and with all her strength cuts off shavings to light the fire.

In a letter to his close friend Max Brod in April 1913, the feeding of the flames turned into the feeding of a dog:

Fantasies, for example, that I lie stretched out on the floor, sliced up like a roast, and with my hand slowly push one of the pieces of meat to a dog in the corner – such fantasies are my mind’s daily nourishment.

A month later, Kafka testified in his diary to the recurrence of the vision, while rehearsing another variation of it:

Perpetually the image of a broad butcher’s knife that in the greatest haste and with mechanical regularity pierces me from the side and cuts off very thin cross sections, which during the quick work fly away almost rolled up.

With the ‘mechanical regularity’ of this mutilation, Kafka anticipated the torture and execution device at the centre of his story ‘In the Penal Colony’, which inscribes the condemned man’s transgression into his body. (A later passage in the diaries written for that story, but not ultimately included in it, also echoed his 1911 entry on his headache as a knife in his skull: ‘And even if everything was unchanged, the spike was still there, crookedly jutting out of his shattered forehead.’) The ‘broad butcher’s knife’ might have belonged to the same set of knives as the ‘long thin double-edged butcher’s knife’, which, in Kafka’s unfinished novel The Trial , is thrust into the protagonist’s heart and turned twice.

His ‘dreamlike inner life’ traversed distinctions between modes of writing

And could that knife be the same one Kafka evoked in a diary entry in November 1911: ‘This morning for the first time in a long while the pleasure again in imagining a knife twisted in my heart’? Or in an entry in September 1915:

The most fruitful place to stab seems to be between neck and chin. Lift the chin and thrust the knife into the tautened muscles. But the place is probably fruitful only in one’s imagination. There one expects to see a magnificent gush of blood and to tear apart a network of sinews and little bones, such as one finds in the roasted legs of turkeys.

The versatility with which Kafka adapted this image to ever-new forms and functions is epitomised by a letter to Milena Jesenská in September 1920: ‘Love is that you are the knife with which I dig inside myself.’ To trace Kafka’s reimaginings of such a motif – one that kept resurfacing in different contexts, migrating through his notebooks, letters and fiction – is to witness how his ongoing effort to depict what he called his ‘dreamlike inner life’ traversed distinctions between modes of writing. For Kafka, it seems, the act of putting pen to paper was always, at least potentially, an occasion to further elaborate his literary idiom.

Kafka’s diaries reveal how relentlessly he exploited the creative possibilities of his anxieties, doubts and self-torments. In these notebooks, Kafka was all over the place, recording daily experiences and observations, describing dreams, composing autobiographical recollections, jotting stray thoughts and impressions, excerpting reading material, outlining planned works, drafting fiction, letters, essays and aphorisms. His incessant reworking of texts in successive iterations, his false starts and stabs in the dark, his misspellings, slips of the pen, sparse and unorthodox punctuation, occasionally muddled syntax, and other stylistic quirks and infelicities – all these are direct traces of the haste, spontaneity and restless experimentation with which he wrote in his diaries.

In the midst of this disarray of disparate scraps erupted more fully realised works, such as the first drafts of the stories ‘The Judgment’ and ‘The Stoker’. Their emergence here – along with a number of prose miniatures that Kafka later published in Prague literary journals and collected in his first book, Contemplation – reflects the generative nature of the diaries as a whole. The creation of these pieces is sponsored by the abortive attempts preceding and following them, all animated by his overriding impulse to give artistic form to whatever he set down on the page. The rough edges and idiosyncrasies of their rendering in the diaries would be edited only subsequently. As yet unpolished, in their workshop phase, they still visibly belong to the flux and instability within which they came into being.

In the open-endedness, provisionality and heterogeneity of his diaries, Kafka was making his way, at times gropingly, toward the writer he would become. Out of his inner struggles and preoccupations, he forged his singular literary voice. In a diary entry in 1911, for example, he grappled with his profound ambivalence about the possibility of marrying and starting a family by enumerating the woes of the bachelor, among them ‘to have to marvel at strange children and not be permitted to keep repeating: I have none, to have an unchanging sense of one’s age since no family grows with one, to model oneself in appearance and behaviour on the one or two bachelors of our youthful memories.’ This text he later revised and published under the title ‘The Unhappiness of the Bachelor’.

T hroughout his adult life, Kafka equated being a bachelor with being condemned to stagnation. At the age of 28, he wrote in his diary:

An unhappy person who is to have no child is terribly confined in his unhappiness. Nowhere a hope for renewal, for help from happier stars. He must make his way afflicted with unhappiness when his circle is finished, content himself and no longer take up the thread to test whether on a longer path, under different circumstances of body and time, this unhappiness he has suffered could disappear or even bring forth something good

An entry he wrote a decade later, after three failed marital engagements, registered how little his sentiments had changed:

The infinite deep warm saving happiness of sitting beside the basket of one’s child opposite its mother.

There is also something in this of the feeling: things no longer hinge on you, unless you want them to. In contrast the feeling of the childless man: things constantly hinge on you whether you want them to or not, every moment until the end, every nerve-racking moment, things constantly hinge on you and to no purpose. Sisyphus was a bachelor.

And yet, for all his discontent with his bachelorhood, facing the prospect of matrimony, Kafka vacillated between longing and dread. Shortly before his first engagement, he staged a self-interrogation as a dialogue in his diary, prodding himself to weigh a future as a husband and father against one in which he would at last leave his post at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, move away from Prague, and devote himself wholly to literature – an uncertain existence he thought incompatible with a settled domestic life.

Organic predispositions hindered him from applying his energies to any other sphere, including a love life

Kafka’s ultimate inability to take a decisive step on one of these two paths consigned him to painful self-division. By day an insurance official, by night an insomniac scribe of the liminal space between waking and dreaming, he denied his capacity to negotiate the conflict between his breadwinning job and his literary calling. He dramatised this dilemma in a letter of apology to his boss, written in his diary on 19 February 1911, for his absence from work that day:

When I tried to get out of bed today I simply collapsed. There’s a very simple reason for it, I am completely overworked. Not by the office but by my other work. The office plays an innocent part in it only insofar as, if I didn’t have to go there, I could live in peace for my work and wouldn’t have to spend those 6 hours a day there, which have so tormented me that you cannot imagine it, especially on Friday and Saturday, because I was full of my concerns. In the end as I am well aware this is only chatter, it’s my fault and the office has the clearest and most justified claims on me. But for me it is a horrible double life from which insanity is probably the only way out.

In an entry in January 1912, he attributed the irreconcilability between his nocturnal activity and his official duties to organic predispositions that likewise hindered him from adequately applying his energies to any other sphere, including a love life:

In me a concentration on writing can be recognised quite easily. When it had become clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction of my being, everything thronged there and left empty all the abilities that were directed toward the pleasures of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection music first and foremost. I wasted away in all these directions. This was necessary because my powers in their entirety were so slight that only gathered could they halfway serve the purpose of writing. Naturally I didn’t find this purpose independently and consciously, it found itself and is now hindered only by the office, but here thoroughly so. In any case, however, I must not bemoan the fact that I can’t bear a beloved, that I understand of love almost exactly as much as I do of music and have to content myself with the most superficial chance effects, that on New Year’s Eve I had black salsify with spinach for dinner and drank with it ¼ liter of Ceres and that on Sunday I couldn’t participate in Max’s reading of his philosophical work; the compensation for all this is perfectly clear. Thus I only have to throw the office work out of this community in order, since my development is now completed and as far as I can see I have nothing more to sacrifice, to begin my real life, in which my face will at last be able to age in a natural way with the progress of my works.

If not a family, then his literary productivity could free him from stasis – but only provided that it was permitted to proceed uninhibited by his office work.

K afka would turn to his writing at the end of a day consumed with drafting legal documents and classifying industrial firms based on accident risk. In a diary entry in October 1911, he deployed the image of self-butchery to express the violence he inflicted on himself by straining to find a word for a bureaucratic report he was dictating to the office typist, when that exertion ought to have been expended on creating literature:

At last I have the word ‘stigmatize’ and the sentence that goes with it, but still hold everything in my mouth with a feeling of disgust and shame as if it were raw meat, cut out of my own flesh (so much effort has it cost me). At last I say it, but retain the great horror that everything in me is ready for a literary work and such a work would be a heavenly dissolution and a real coming alive for me, while here in the office for the sake of so wretched a document I must rob a body capable of such happiness of a piece of its flesh

Averse to all non-literary pursuits because his ‘powers in their entirety were so slight that only gathered could they halfway serve the purpose of writing,’ Kafka presented his predicament in terms of the need to allocate his scarce, easily depleted reserves of mental and physical energy. In a diary entry in November 1911, he imagined his vitality being spread too thin through his long, frail body:

There’s no doubt that a main obstacle to my progress is my physical condition. With such a body nothing can be achieved. I will have to get used to its perpetual failure. From the last few wildly dreamed-through but barely even snatchily slept-through nights I was so incoherent this morning, felt nothing but my forehead, saw a halfway bearable condition only far beyond the present one and in sheer readiness for death at one point would have liked to curl up with the documents in my hand on the cement tiles of the corridor. My body is too long for its weakness, it has not the least fat to generate a blessed warmth, to preserve inner fire, no fat on which the spirit might at some point nourish itself beyond its daily need without damage to the whole. How is the weak heart, which recently has often stabbed me, supposed to push the blood down the whole length of these legs. To the knee would be enough work, but then it is washed with only decrepit strength into the cold lower legs. But now it is already needed again up above, one waits for it while it dissipates down below. Due to the length of the body everything is pulled apart. What can it accomplish then, when perhaps even if it were compressed, it wouldn’t have enough strength for what I want to achieve.

His perception of his body as lacking vigour, sickly , irremediably defective, was inseparable from his self-recrimination and despair over not making ‘progress’ in his writing and his life.

‘The way I led my life never proved its worth in the slightest’

Stalled progress was a signature theme of Kafka’s work, most notably his unfinished novels The Trial and The Castle . In them, tenaciously striving, forever stymied protagonists encounter unforeseen setbacks at every turn, finding their desires and designs inexorably and capriciously thwarted, their hopes nullified by insurmountable impediments, their goals fundamentally unattainable. Their frantic, apparently purposeful, ceaseless action conceals a futile waiting and paralysis.

The diaries are filled with images of motion and standstill, from the very first entry: ‘The spectators stiffen when the train passes.’ The coupling of the train’s onrush with the spectators’ rigidity is reminiscent of the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea’s paradoxes, which Kafka invoked in an entry in December 1910: ‘Zeno answered an urgent question as to whether nothing ever rests: Yes the flying arrow rests’. As it whizzes through the air, Zeno argued, the arrow is every instant at rest in whatever position it occupies, leading him to conclude that movement and change are illusory, impossible. In early 1922, the year Kafka began writing The Castle , he wrote in his diary:

[M]y life until now has been a marching in place, a development at most in the sense a tooth becoming hollow and decaying undergoes one. The way I led my life never proved its worth in the slightest. It was as if I like every other person had been given the center of a circle, as if I then like every other person had to follow the decisive radius and then draw the beautiful circle. Instead I have perpetually started the radius, but again and again had to break it off immediately (examples: piano, violin, languages, German studies, anti-Zionism, Zionism, Hebrew, gardening, carpentry, literature, marriage attempts, an apartment of my own) The center of the imaginary circle bristles with beginnings of radii, there is no more space for a new attempt, no space means age, weakness of nerves, and no further attempt means the end. If I have ever brought the radius a little bit farther than usual, perhaps in the case of my law studies or engagements, everything was simply worse by this little bit, instead of better.

Looking back on his life from the age of 38, several years after being diagnosed with tuberculosis and just a couple of years from ‘the end’, Kafka saw ‘a marching in place’. He appears to have found confirmation of what he had long since suspected and what his writing insistently implied: Zeno was right.

Kafka’s perpetual redescription of his plight suggests that throughout his writing life he was less interested in finding a solution or even arriving at a single, definitive formulation of the problem than he was in exploring the implications and complications of his situation from new, unexpected angles and crafting an ever-expanding lexicon of figures for its inescapability. It’s as if his imagination was propelled in so many directions by his stuckness itself. Rather than trying to write his way out of the unanswerable questions and unresolvable ambiguities in which he was mired, he worked them into the warp and weft of his art. For generations of readers, Kafka’s frenetic inventiveness became a resource far richer than relief, consolation, determinacy or completion. His writing jolts us, surprises us, disconcerts us, baffles us. It at once provokes us to laugh at our suffering, our estrangement, our irrationality, and exposes us all the more helplessly to them. It leaves us unprotected, and makes us feel more alive.

Note on translation: In my translation of The Diaries , I hewed closely to the original text of the handwritten notebooks, as faithfully transcribed by the German critical edition published in 1990 by S Fischer Verlag, deliberately reproducing Kafka’s omitted and non-standard punctuation, and other lapses and inconsistencies.

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Home › Literature › Analysis of Franz Kafka’s Stories

Analysis of Franz Kafka’s Stories

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 5, 2019 • ( 0 )

Franz Kafka ’s (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) stories are not about love or success. They do not leave the reader feeling comfortable. Writing was, for him, a necessity. On August 6, 1914, Kafka wrote in his diary: “My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background; my life has dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle. Nothing else will ever satisfy me.” The meaning of the images from his dreamlike inner life was not always clear to him at the time of writing. Sometimes he realized only several years later what he may have subconsciously meant. Toward the end of his life, he decided that psychoanalysis was a waste of time and abandoned that approach in retrospective reading. Critics may not be of the same opinion.

The Metamorphosis

The opening sentence of “The Metamorphosis” is one of the most famous in modern fiction: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” In the story’s first section, Gregor accepts his fantastic transformation matter-of-factly, perhaps wishing to bury its causes in his subconscious mind. Instead of worrying about the mystery of his metamorphosis, he worries about the nature and security of his position as traveling salesperson for a firm whose severity he detests.

In the second section, Gregor’s isolation and alienation intensify. Readers learn about his relations, past and present, with his family; they have been characterized by concealment, mistrust, and exploitation on the father’s part. Gregor’s mother is gentle, selfless, weak, and shallow; in the story’s development she becomes increasingly her husband’s appendage. His sister Grete is his favorite; however, although she ministers to his new animal needs, she fails him emotionally. In the third section, Gregor, defeated, yields up all hope of returning to the human community. His parents and sister shut him out, as his miserable existence slopes resignedly toward death.

Gregor’s metamorphosis accomplishes several of his aims: First, it frees him from his hated job with an odious employer by disabling him from working; second, it relieves him of the requirement to make an agonizing choice between his filial duty to his parents—particularly his father—and his desperate yearning to emancipate himself from such obligations and dependence. It thus enables him to “bug out” of his loathsome constraints yet do so on a level of conscious innocence, with Gregor merely a victim of an uncontrollable calamity. Moreover, Gregor’s fantasies include aggressive and retaliatory action against the oppressive firm. He accomplishes this by terrorizing the pitiless, arrogant office manager, who tells him, “I am speaking here in the name of your parents and of your chief.” On the conscious level, Gregor pursues the clerk to appease him and secure his advocacy for Gregor’s cause at the office; subconsciously, his threatening appearance and apparently hostile gestures humiliate his hated superiors.

Gregor’s change also expresses his sense of guilt at having betrayed his work and his parents, at having broken the familial circle. It is a treacherous appeasement of this guilt complex, inviting his isolation, punishment, and death. His loss of human speech prevents him from communicating his humanity. His enormous size, though an insect (he is at least two feet wide), his ugly features, and his malodorous stench invite fear and revulsion. Yet his pacific temperament and lack of claws, teeth, or wings make him far more vulnerable than when his body was human. His metamorphosis therefore gives him the worst of both worlds: He is offensive in appearance but defenseless in fact, exposed to the merciless attack of anyone—such as his furious father—ready to exploit his vulnerability.

“The Metamorphosis,” then, can be seen as a punishment fantasy with Gregor Samsa feeling triply guilty of having displaced his father as leading breadwinner for the family, for his hatred of his job, and resentment of his family’s expectations of him. He turns himself into a detestable insect, thereby both rebelling against the authority of his firm and father and punishing himself for this rebellion by seeking estrangement, rejection, and death. Insofar as Gregor’s physical manifestation constitutes a translation of the interior self to the external world, “The Metamorphosis” is a stellar achievement of expressionism.

The Judgment

Kafka wrote “Das Urteil” (“The Judgment”) in one sitting through the night of September 22-23, 1912. It was an eminently satisfying experience, the only one of his works that he said came out of him like a birth. When he sat down to write, he had intended to depict a war scene. Then, the story took its own direction, and when he finished, early in the morning, he was not sure what it meant. He knew only that it was good.

In the course of “The Judgment,” the main character, Georg Bendemann, experiences a complete reversal in his plans. At the outset, he announces his engagement to Frieda Brandenfeld. At the end, he commits suicide. The transition from good news to bad and the descent from normalcy into apparent madness are subtly accomplished. With hindsight, one can see that warning signs are held up all the way. Yet none of these signs is in itself shocking enough to alienate the reader. Only their cumulative effect is overwhelming. Kafka’s stories wield their powerful influence over the reader’s mood by always remaining plausible. While never losing the semblance of logical reportage, Kafka creates scenes of horror, which both spring from and give rise to psychological suffering. Anything resembling such scenes has come to be called “Kafkaesque.”

Kafka writes metaphorically, letting characters, actions, and objects represent emotional and psychological states. Thus, the works are understood best not as narrative advancing a plot but in terms of the protagonist’s attempts to transcend absurdity, depersonalization, and alienation. There is a strong autobiographical element in all the stories.

Most critics equate Georg Bendemann with Kafka, and Georg’s father with Kafka’s father. The issue to be dealt with, then, is why the father would violently oppose the son’s engagement to a woman from a well-to-do family. To accept that, one has to subscribe to an inverse standard. Kate Flores interprets this aspect of “The Judgment” in an anthropological way, explaining that for precivilized man it was an act of insubordination to supplant the dominant male. Certainly, “The Judgment” does contain elements of a primal struggle. Also consistent with this reading is the father’s tenacious hold on Georg’s watch chain, as if to halt the inexorable advance of time and the aging process. There is also the fact that Kafka’s father did indeed deride one of his engagements, although at a much later date than when “The Judgment” was written.

Kafka’s stories support many interpretations. It is important, when reading “The Judgment,” that one not concentrate on the apparent polarity of father and son to the exclusion of the curious figure of the friend in Russia, to whom the first third of the story is devoted. In fact, preposterous though it may seem, the most comprehensive reading results from considering all three male figures—the friend in Russia, Georg Bendemann, and his father—to be different aspects of the same person, namely Kafka. It is significant that only one name is provided.

The friend in Russia immediately becomes associated with writing, because Georg has been writing to him for years. This association is reinforced when the father, surprisingly, also claims to have been writing to the friend. After Georg has brought up the matter of an engagement on three separate occasions, the friend in Russia responds by showing some interest, but as with his emotionless reaction to the death of Georg’s mother, the friend’s interest in human affairs seems perfunctory. He has few social contacts, has let his business slide, and seems to be in a general state of ill health and decline. His life has dwindled dreadfully. This identifies him with Kafka the writer.

Georg Bendemann’s business seems to have been operating in inverse proportion to that of his friend in Russia. It is thriving, and he has recently become engaged. The thriving business and the engagement go hand in hand in “The Judgment.” Both are traditionally recognized outward signs of success. Kafka, at the time of writing “The Judgment,” was already a successful lawyer, well established in his firmand becoming interested in Felice Bauer, who seems to be represented in the story by her close namesake, Frieda Brandenfeld. Frieda makes a remark to Georg that, on the surface, is very puzzling. She tells him that since he has friends such as the one in Russia, he should never have gotten engaged. This is the warning sign that either Frieda or the friend in Russia will have to go. The application to Kafka’s life seems clear: Either Felice or the writing will have to go.

The most interesting and complex of the three male figures is the father. While appearing to oppose Georg, the older man can, in this case, actually be relied on to say what Georg wants to hear. Faced with the irreconcilable conflict between loyalty to his longtime friend in Russia and loyalty to his new fiancé, Georg finds himself inexplicably going to his father’s room, where he has not been for some time. The sunlight is blocked by a wall, the father is surrounded by ancient newspapers, and the window is shut. It is a trip into the dark and the past, which is sealed off from the outside world. The father represents the subconscious. He is also the progenitor, and he is still, despite some deceptive signs of senility, the figure of authority.

The father’s first remark, which points beyond the frame of the surface story, is his question of whether Georg really has a friend in St. Petersburg. What the father really seems to be asking is whether the friend can continue to be called a friend when he has been so neglected. Georg at this point is still inclined to decide in favor of Frieda and an outwardly successful life, so he endeavors to quell the troubling reference to his friend by carrying his father from the dark out into the light and then covering him up, thereby forcibly suppressing the question of the friend.

Contrary to Georg’s intent, this results in the father’s exploding into action. In an extraordinarily dramatic scene, he hurls off the blankets, leaps to his feet, and, standing upright on the bed and kicking, denounces Georg’s plans for marriage and accuses him of playing the false friend all these years. Georg realizes that he should be on his guard against attack but then forgets again and stands defenseless before his father.

The father’s second remark that seems rather incredible in terms of the surface story is that the friend in Russia has not been betrayed after all, because he, the father, has also been writing to him all along and representing him. Suppressed talents are only strengthened in the subconscious. The father now unquestionably has the upper hand and pronounces his judgment over Georg: He was an innocent child, but he has been a devilish human being. Presumably, it was during childhood that Georg cultivated the friend now in Russia. As an adult, getting ever more into business and thoughts of marriage, Georg has been devilish by denying his true self, the writer. The father finishes by sentencing Georg to death by drowning. To drown is to be plunged into the creative element.

Georg confirms the validity of his father’s verdict by carrying out the sentence. It is important for the reader to remember that as the father crashes on the bed exhausted, the subconscious having asserted itself, and as Georg lets himself fall from the bridge, effectively ending the business career and the engagement, it is the formerly faded and foreign true self, the writer, who remains. Thus, what seems on first reading to be a horror story of insanity and suicide is actually not a disaster at all but an exercise in self-preservation. No sooner had Kafka become romantically involved with Felice than he had worked out subconsciously how detrimental such a relationship would be to his career as a writer. With such personal material, it is no wonder the writer in Kafka felt inspired to finish “The Judgment” in one sitting. Ironically, his conscious mind was at that point still so far behind the insights of the subconscious that he dedicated the story to none other than Felice Bauer.

The subtitle of Heinz Politzer’s book on Kafka, Parable and Paradox, evokes the elusive nature of Kafka’s story lines, which are charged with opposing forces seeking synthesis. Although most of the stories are grim, the reader cannot help but be amused at the outrageous, at times burlesque turns of events. Only the bleak and disquieting desperation of the characters contradicts the humor inherent in their situations. Also, many of the stories end with the main character dead or reduced to a state of utter hopelessness. Many of the longer stories, such as “The Judgment,” are so complex that they can be confusing. Kafka’s shorter stories, consisting of only a paragraph or a page or two, sometimes leave a more lasting impression, because they each center on one main event.

Give It Up!

Politzer begins his study with a lengthy discussion of a 124-word commentary that Kafka wrote late in 1922. In the commentary, which has become known as “Give It Up!,” a traveler heading for the train station early one morning becomes disconcerted when he checks his watch against a clock tower and thinks that he must be late. In his haste, he becomes uncertain of the way and has to ask a police officer. The officer repeats the question, then tells the man to give up and turns away from him. The police officer’s reply is both hilarious and profoundly unsettling. It is hilarious because it is completely out of line with what a police officer would say. It is unsettling because it lifts the story out of the mundane into a world where not only time but also, apparently, place have lost their relevance and it is impossible to determine one’s way. The issue has become existential.

Before the Law

Kafka innately distrusted figures of authority and frequently portrayed them maliciously misleading and abusing those who came under their power. The 1922 commentary is simply a lighter variation on the theme that Kafka stated unforgettably in 1914 in his parable “Vor dem Gesetz” (“Before the Law”). This moving and perfect piece of writing was later incorporated into chapter 19 of Kafka’s novel Der Prozess (1925; T he Trial , 1937).

In the two-page parable, a man from the country seeks access to the law. He is told by the doorkeeper that he may not enter at the moment but possibly later. The man is deterred from entering without permission by the doorkeeper’s telling him that this is only the first of many doors that are guarded by increasingly powerful doorkeepers. The man spends the rest of his life there waiting for admittance and gives away everything he owns in unsuccessful attempts to bribe the doorkeeper. Finally, in his dying hour, he asks why no one else has come to that door, only to hear the doorkeeper say: “This door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.”

The parable is not enlightening. By the time the man finds out that he should go through the door after all, it is shut in his face. The story seems, rather, to be a comment on the human condition as Kafka experienced it in early twentieth century Europe. The rise of science and industry had displaced but could not replace religion, with the result that human beings could no longer find their way. The human institutions, the apparent absolutes represented by the law, prove to be fallible, imperfect, and unreliable. Nothing now can fill the human need for direction in life. Reality has become fragmented and disjunctive. “Before the Law” is particularly poignant because the reader cannot help but believe that, before the law, human beings are all people from the country, simple, helpless creatures who have lost their way.

The Bucket Rider

The way out of this impossible situation is brilliantly described with humor and sadness in Kafka’s three-page story “Der Kübelreiter” (“The Bucket Rider”), written during a coal shortage in the winter of 1916. The main character has no coal, and it is bitterly cold. He also has no money but goes to the coal dealer anyway, to ask for only a shovelful. To show how desperate he is, he rides there on his empty coal bucket, sailing through the air and calling down from high above the dealer’s house. The dealer is deeply moved by the voice of an old customer, but it is his wife who goes to the street to investigate. Once she finds that the bucket rider cannot pay immediately, she claims to see no one and waves him away with her apron. The bucket is too light to offer any resistance. The rider ascends “into the regions of the ice mountains” and is “lost for ever.”

This story contains the delightful, dreamlike element of the fantastic that is a source of great beauty in Kafka’s works. The moment the main character decides to ride on his bucket, which occurs at the beginning of the second paragraph, he is lifted out of everyday reality, in which he would surely have frozen to death. Kafka shows, once again, that it is useless to plead with others, especially those who have some authority. Rather than send his main character on an empty bucket back to his freezing room, Kafka has the bucket whisk him away into the ice mountains, never to return. Coal and indeed all mundane concerns cease to be a problem as the bucket rider leaves behind the human habitat. Thwarted by everyday pettiness, he has moved instead into a timeless mental space that seems infinitely more interesting. In “The Bucket Rider,” Kafka represents that space with the image of distant ice mountains. In his fifty-second aphorism, he writes a literal description of that saving space: “There is only a spiritual world; what we call the physical world is the evil in the spiritual one, and what we call evil is only a necessary moment in our endless development.” The bucket rider has transcended the evil phase.

A Country Doctor

The winter of 1916 was one of Kafka’s most prolific periods and one in which he seemed especially visually oriented and inclined toward the fantastic. His seven-page masterpiece “Ein Landarzt” (“A Country Doctor”) is one of his most involved works. It contains all Kafka’s main themes and the salient features of his style.

As in “The Bucket Rider,” the setting of “A Country Doctor” is an icy winter, and the mood is one of confused, melancholy desperation. The situation is hopeless, and the doctor sees no way out of it. Unlike “The Bucket Rider,” which has only one main event, “A Country Doctor” is a richly textured work. The most rewarding interpretive approach is that employed here in examining “The Judgment.” There are three main male characters: the country doctor, the groom, and the sick boy. They seem to represent different aspects of the same person, and the story, once again, seems to be autobiographical.

The country doctor is an older man who has been working for a long time in his profession, and he is disillusioned. The local people, while placing many demands on him, do nothing to help him. Not one of the neighbors would lend him a horse in an emergency. In keeping with the spirit of the age, the people have lost their faith in religion and look instead to science and medicine to perform the miracles, backing up the doctor’s efforts with choral chanting as if he were a medicine man. He is the only one sadly aware of the limitations of his profession but plays out the charade in a resigned fashion, eventually lying outright to the boy by minimizing the severity of his fatal wound.

Kafka was a professional as well, a lawyer who in 1916 had already worked nine years after articling. Although he was a dedicated and valued member of his firm, he regarded his work as a necessary evil, as his means of earning a living so that he could write in his spare time. He was not disillusioned with law, but neither did he harbor any cherished illusions about his distinguished profession. He believed that, as it did to the man from the country in “Before the Law,” law was wearing him out. Readers will equate the country doctor with Kafka the lawyer.

In order of appearance, the second male character in “A Country Doctor” is the groom. That he belongs to the country doctor or is part of him is evidenced by the servant girl’s remark, “You never know what you’re going to find in your own house.” Certainly, the groom represents a source not tapped in a long time—so long, in fact, that the country doctor is surprised when the man emerges from the abandoned pigsty. By association with the steaming horses, by the birthlike nature of their emergence, and by his rape of Rose, the groom stands for vitality, sensuality, and sex. He is also associated with savagery and filth.

At the time of writing “A Country Doctor,” Kafka had broken off his first engagement to Felice Bauer and had had several short-lived affairs. He was attracted to women but still believed that marriage and his work as a writer were mutually exclusive. His belief that marriage was not for him was based also on his perception of the sexual act as something terrible. Just as the groom represents a repressed aspect of the country doctor, who had all but ignored Rose, so, too, he represents the sexual fulfillment that Kafka decided again and again to sacrifice in order to continue his writing. Readers will equate the groom with Kafka the lover.

The groom and the two horses emerge from the pigsty together, then go off in different directions. While the groom was pursuing Rose, the unearthly horses transported the country doctor to the sick boy. Perhaps the boy was only to be reached by supernatural means. There is a fairy-tale quality to the ten-mile journey. It took only a moment, and the blinding snow was gone, replaced by clear moonlight. The nature of the journey is significant for the reader’s interpretation of the boy. Kafka has placed him in the spiritual world.

Whereas the country doctor is only one of many, as stressed by the indefinite article in the title, the boy is unique. His father, family, and the villagers have no understanding of the boy’s condition. Clearly, the boy is having a hard time of it in these surroundings. Even the doctor feels ill “in the narrow confines of the old man’s thoughts.” Disheartened, the boy at first wants to die. So does the doctor. Once the doctor becomes aware of the unique nature of the boy’s great wound, however, which is both attractive and repulsive, rose-colored and worm-eaten, the boy decides that he wants to live. By then, though, it is too late. The blossom in his side is destroying him.

Like the friend in Russia in “The Judgment,” the boy in “A Country Doctor” appears sickly but turns out to be of supreme importance. Kafka was not physically strong. In 1916, his tuberculosis had not yet been diagnosed, but he suffered from stomach problems. He lived with his parents, who were concerned that the long hours he spent writing were ruining his health. It is therefore fitting that those characters in his stories who represent Kafka the writer appear to be sickly. Readers will equate the boy with Kafka the writer.

Like the surface level of “The Judgment,” the surface level of “A Country Doctor” reads like a tragedy of unequaled proportions. Unable to help the boy, the country doctor finds himself also unable to get home, for the trip away from the boy is as slow as the trip to him was fast. “Exposed to the frost of this most unhappy of ages,” the doctor realizes that, as a result of this trip, he has not only sacrificed his servant girl but also lost his flourishing practice to his successor. What this translates into, though, is a triumph. Kafka the writer has subjugated Kafka the lawyer and Kafka the lover. The famous, peremptorily fatalistic last line of the story reveals its double meaning. “A false alarm on the night bell once answered—it cannot be made good, not ever.” Once Kafka accepted his gift as a writer, he could never abandon that link with the spiritual world.

Kafka’s works show, simultaneously and paradoxically, not only the existential angst inherent in the human condition but also a way out of that hopeless state. If the various characters are considered as elements of a personality seeking integration, the stories end not bleakly but on a transcendent note. Kafka’s refuge was in his writing, in the spiritual world, and in laughter.

Other major works Novels: Der Prozess, 1925 (The Trial, 1937); Das Schloss, 1926 (The Castle, 1930); Amerika, 1927 (America, 1938; better known as Amerika, 1946). Miscellaneous: Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlass, 1953 (Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, 1954; also known as Wedding Preparations in the Country, and Other Posthumous Prose Writings, 1954). Nonfiction: Brief an den Vater, wr. 1919, pb. 1952 (Letter to His Father, 1954); The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1948-1949; Tagebücher, 1910-1923, 1951; Briefe an Milena, 1952 (Letters to Milena, 1953); Briefe, 1902-1924, 1958; Briefe an Felice, 1967 (Letters to Felice, 1974); Briefe an Ottla und die Familie, 1974 (Letters to Ottla and the Family, 1982).

Bibliography Ben-Ephraim, Gavriel. “Making and Breaking Meaning: Deconstruction, Four-Level Allegory, and The Metamorphosis.” The Midwest Quarterly 35 (Summer, 1994): 450- 467. Bloom, Harold, ed. Franz Kafka. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Corngold, Stanley. Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988. Flores, Angel, ed. The Problem of “The Judgement”: Eleven Approaches to Kafka’s Story. New York: Gordian Press, 1976. Hayman, Ronald. K: A Biography of Kafka. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981. Heinemann, Richard. “Kafka’s Oath of Service: ‘Der Bau’ and the Dialectic of Bureaucratic Mind.” PMLA 111 (March, 1996): 256-270. Jofen, Jean. The Jewish Mysticism of Kafka. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. May, Charles E., ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Oz, Amos. “A Log in a Freshet: On the Beginning of Kafka’s ‘A Country Doctor.’” Partisan Review 66 (Spring, 1999): 211-217. Reiner, Stach. Kafka: The Decisive Years. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2005. Speirs, Ronald, and Beatrice Sandberg. Franz Kafka. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

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Kafka and his father

Kafka’s double life.

What kind of relationship did Franz Kafka have with his father?

What was franz kafka’s life like, what did franz kafka write.

Franz Kafka

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His father, a materialistic man of business and a tyrant in his household, had a significant influence on Franz Kafka’s life and work. Kafka felt oppressed by him for most of his life. He appears in many of Kafka’s works, often as an overwhelming despotic power, as in The Trial .

Franz Kafka moved in German Jewish intellectual circles throughout his life. He received a doctorate in law in 1906 from the University of Prague. Afterward he worked for insurance companies, which was time-consuming and left him only late night hours for writing. He was often ill, and sickness ultimately forced him to retire in 1922.

Franz Kafka’s work is characterized by anxiety and alienation, and his characters often face absurd situations. He is famous for his novels The Trial , in which a man is charged with a crime that is never named, and The Metamorphosis , in which the protagonist wakes to find himself transformed into an insect. 

Franz Kafka (born July 3, 1883, Prague, Bohemia , Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic]—died June 3, 1924, Kierling, near Vienna, Austria) was a German-language writer of visionary fiction whose works—especially the novel Der Prozess (1925; The Trial ) and the story Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis )—express the anxieties and alienation felt by many in 20th-century Europe and North America .

Franz Kafka, the son of Julie Löwy and Hermann Kafka, a merchant, was born into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family. After two brothers died in infancy, he became the eldest child and remained, for the rest of his life, conscious of his role as elder brother; Ottla, the youngest of his three sisters, became the family member closest to him. Kafka strongly identified with his maternal ancestors because of their spirituality, intellectual distinction, piety, rabbinical learning, melancholy disposition , and delicate physical and mental constitution. He was not, however, particularly close to his mother. Subservient to her overwhelming ill-tempered husband and his exacting business, she shared with her spouse a lack of comprehension of their son’s unprofitable and, they feared, unhealthy dedication to the literary “recording of [his]…dreamlike inner life.”

The figure of Kafka’s father overshadowed his work as well as his existence. The figure is, in fact, one of his most impressive creations. In his imagination this coarse, practical, and domineering shopkeeper and patriarch who worshipped nothing but material success and social advancement belonged to a race of giants and was an awesome, admirable, but repulsive tyrant. In Kafka’s most important attempt at autobiography , Brief an den Vater (written 1919; Letter to Father ), a letter that never reached the addressee, Kafka attributed his failure to live, to cut loose from parental ties and establish himself in marriage and fatherhood, as well as his escape into literature , to the prohibitive father figure, which instilled in him the sense of his own impotence. He felt his will had been broken by his father. The conflict with the father is reflected directly in Kafka’s story Das Urteil (1913; The Judgment ). It is projected on a grander scale in Kafka’s novels, which portray in lucid , deceptively simple prose a man’s desperate struggle with an overwhelming power, one that may persecute its victim (as in The Trial ) or one that may be sought after and begged in vain for approval (as in Das Schloss [1926; The Castle ]). Yet the roots of Kafka’s anxiety and despair go deeper than his relationship with his father and family, with whom he chose to live in close and cramped proximity for the major part of his adult life. The source of Kafka’s despair lies in a sense of ultimate isolation from true communion with all human beings—the friends he cherished, the women he loved, the job he detested, the society he lived in—and with God, or, as he put it, with true indestructible Being.

The son of an assimilated Jew who held only perfunctorily to the religious practices and social formalities of the Jewish community , Kafka was German in both language and culture . He was a timid, guilt-ridden, and obedient child who did well in elementary school and in the Altstädter Staatsgymnasium, an exacting high school for the academic elite. He was respected and liked by his teachers. Inwardly, however, he rebelled against the authoritarian institution and the dehumanized humanistic curriculum, with its emphasis on rote learning and classical languages. Kafka’s opposition to established society became apparent when, as an adolescent, he declared himself a socialist as well as an atheist . Throughout his adult life he expressed qualified sympathies for the socialists, he attended meetings of Czech anarchists (before World War I ), and in his later years he showed marked interest and sympathy for a socialized Zionism . Even then he was essentially passive and politically unengaged. As a Jew, Kafka was isolated from the German community in Prague , but, as a modern intellectual, he was also alienated from his own Jewish heritage. He was sympathetic to Czech political and cultural aspirations , but his identification with German culture kept even these sympathies subdued. Thus, social isolation and rootlessness contributed to Kafka’s lifelong personal unhappiness.

Kafka did, however, become friendly with some German Jewish intellectuals and literati in Prague, and in 1902 he met Max Brod . This minor literary artist became the most intimate and solicitous of Kafka’s friends, and eventually, as Kafka’s literary executor, he emerged as the promoter, saviour, and interpreter of Kafka’s writings and as his most influential biographer. The two men became acquainted while Kafka was studying law at the University of Prague . He received his doctorate in 1906, and in 1907 he took up regular employment with an insurance company. The long hours and exacting requirements of the Assicurazioni Generali, however, did not permit Kafka to devote himself to writing. In 1908 he found in Prague a job in the seminationalized Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. There he remained until 1917, when tuberculosis forced him to take intermittent sick leaves and, finally, to retire (with a pension) in 1922, about two years before he died. In his job he was considered tireless and ambitious; he soon became the right hand of his boss, and he was esteemed and liked by all who worked with him.

In fact, generally speaking, Kafka was a charming, intelligent, and humorous individual, but he found his routine office job and the exhausting double life into which it forced him (for his nights were frequently consumed in writing) to be excruciating torture , and his deeper personal relationships were neurotically disturbed. The conflicting inclinations of his complex and ambivalent personality found expression in his sexual relationships. Inhibition painfully disturbed his relations with Felice Bauer, to whom he was twice engaged before their final rupture in 1917. Later his love for Milena Jesenská Pollak was also thwarted. His health was poor and office work exhausted him. In 1917 he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, and from then onward he spent frequent periods in sanatoriums.

In 1923 Kafka went to Berlin to devote himself to writing. During a vacation on the Baltic coast later that year, he met Dora Dymant (Diamant), a young Jewish socialist. The couple lived in Berlin until Kafka’s health significantly worsened during the spring of 1924. After a brief final stay in Prague, where Dymant joined him, he died of tuberculosis in a clinic near Vienna .

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The Absurdity of Existence: Franz Kafka and Albert Camus

September 16, 2015 | yalepress | Literature

Absurdist literature is notoriously difficult to read. Take, for example, Kafka’s short story, “The Metamorphosis,” in which the main character turns into a giant cockroach. Critics have produced countless different theories to explain the significance of Gregor Samsa’s transformation—and this diversity of interpretive meanings, John Sutherland proposes in A Little History of Literature , is the paradoxical result of a type of literature that takes the meaninglessness of life as its premise. In the following excerpt, Sutherland introduces Kafka’s literary mission to assert the pointlessness of literature, and discusses his influence on another writer who grappled constantly with the problems of existentialism and absurdism, Albert Camus. Check out the rest of our Little Histories here .

If you made a list of the most gripping opening lines in literature, the following would surely make it into the top ten:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

It is from a short story, “The Metamorphosis,” by Franz Kafka (1883–1924). It’s probable that Kafka did not much care whether we read this sentence or anything that he wrote. He instructed his friend and executor Max Brod to burn his literary remains “preferably unread” after his death—he died prematurely, aged forty, from tuberculosis. Brod, thankfully, defied the instruction. Kafka speaks to us despite Kafka.

The human condition, for Kafka, is well beyond tragic or depressed. It is “absurd.” He believed that the whole human race was the product of one of “God’s bad days.” There is no “meaning” to make sense of our lives. Paradoxically that meaninglessness allows us to read into Kafka’s novels such as The Trial (which is about a legal “process” which doesn’t process anything), or his stories like “The Metamorphosis,” whatever meanings we please. For example, critics have viewed Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a cockroach as an allegory of anti-Semitism, a grim forecast of the criminal extermination of a supposedly “verminous” race. (Kafka was Jewish, and just a little older than Adolf Hitler.) Writers often foresee such things coming before other people do. “The Metamorphosis,” published in 1915, has also been seen as foreshadowing the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, after the First World War. Kafka and his fellow citizens in Bohemia, centered in Prague, had lived under that vast empire. They woke up suddenly to find their identities had vanished. Others have read the story in terms of Kafka’s problematic relationship with his father, a coarse-grained businessman. Whenever Franz nervously gave his father one of his works, it would be returned unread. His father despised his son.

But any such “meanings” crumple because there is no larger or underlying meaning in the Kafka universe to underpin them. Yet absurdist literature still had a mission—to assert that literature is, like everything else, pointless. Kafka’s disciple, the playwright Samuel Beckett, put it well: the writer “has nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”

Albert Camus’s opening proposition in his best-known essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” is that “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” It echoes Kafka’s bleak aphorism: “A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.” Why not, when life is pointless? Camus’s essay pictures the human condition in the mythical figure Sisyphus, doomed for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, only for it to fall down again. Pointless. Only two responses are feasible in the face of man’s Sisyphean fate: suicide or rebellion. Camus appended a long note—”Hope and the Absurd in the Works of Franz Kafka”—to his Sisyphus essay, commemorating the writer to whose influence he was indebted.

Kafka’s influence is evident in Camus’s fictional masterpiece The Outsider , written and published under Nazi occupation censorship. The action is set in Algiers, nominally part of Metropolitan France. The narrative opens bleakly: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday: I can’t be sure.” Nor does the French Algerian hero, Meursault, care. He cares about nothing. He has, he confides, “lost the habit of noting his feelings.” For no particular reason, he shoots an Arab. His only explanation, not that he troubles to come up with explanations, even to save his life, is that it was very hot that day. He goes to the guillotine, not even caring about that. He hopes the crowd watching the execution will jeer.

It was Camus’s comrade in philosophy, Jean-Paul Sartre, who perceived, most clearly, what drastic things Kafka had done to fiction’s rule book. Generically, as Sartre wrote in a digression in his novel Nausea (1938), the novel presumes to makes sense, fully aware that life doesn’t make sense. This “bad faith” is its “secret power.” Novels, said Sartre, are “machines that secrete spurious meaning into the world.” They are necessary, but intrinsically dishonest. What else do we have in life other than the “spurious meanings” we invent?

—Excerpt from A Little History of Literature , John Sutherland

John Sutherland , Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature, University College London, has taught students at every level and is the author or editor of more than 20 books. He lives in London.

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A Summary and Analysis of Franz Kafka’s The Trial

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) has been called everything from a modernist to an existentialist, a fantasy writer to a realist. His work almost stands alone as its own subgenre, and the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ – whose meaning, like the meaning of Kafka’s work, is hard to pin down – has become well-known even to people who have never read a word of Kafka’s writing.

Perhaps inevitably, he is often misinterpreted as being a gloomy and humourless writer about nightmarish scenarios, when this at best conveys only part of what he is about.

Three of Kafka’s works stand as his most representative. It depends on how we choose to approach him as to whether we favour ‘The Metamorphosis’ (his long short story, which we have analysed here , about a man who wakes one morning to discover he has been transformed into a ‘vermin’), The Castle (a quest with no end-goal – and no castle), or The Trial . But perhaps it is The Trial , most of all, that is responsible for the most prevalent meaning of the term ‘Kafkaesque’.

Before we offer an analysis of this obscure and endlessly provocative novel, here’s a brief summary of the plot of Kafka’s The Trial .

The Trial : plot summary

Josef K., the chief cashier in a bank, is arrested one morning by two mysterious agents. However, they refuse to tell him what crime he is accused of. He is not thrown into prison pending his trial, but allowed to carry on with his day-to-day affairs until summoned by the Committee of Affairs.

His landlady, Frau Grubach, suggests that the trial may relate to an immoral relationship with his neighbour, Fräulein Bürstner, so he goes to visit her and ends up kissing her. He then finds out that a lodger from a neighbouring room, a Fräulein Montag, has moved in with Fräulein Bürstner, and he suspects this has been done in order that Bürstner might distance herself from any involvement with Josef K.

Next, he is ordered to appear at the court in person on Sunday, though he is not informed of the date of his hearing or the precise room in which it is to take place. He eventually locates the correct room in the attic, and is informed that he’s late for the meeting. He tries to defend himself, pointing out the baselessness of the accusation against him, but this only riles the authorities further.

So he next tries to quiz the judge about the nature of his case, but the judge’s wife attempts to seduce him. The judge then takes K. on a tour of the court’s offices. Then, things take an even more bizarre turn as K. stumbles upon the two anonymous agents who arrested him at the start of the novel. They are being whipped by a man because of what K. said at the attic hearing. K., however, attempts to intercede and plea on their behalf, but the man continues to whip them.

Josef K. receives a visit from his uncle, who is concerned about the rumours surrounding K. and the trial. He introduces his nephew to Herr Huld, a lawyer who is confined to his bed and looked after by a young nurse named Leni. Leni seduces K, and when his uncle discovers that K. accepted the woman’s advances, he is annoyed by his nephew’s behaviour and thinks it will hamper his trial.

Realising that Huld is an unreliable advocate for his cause, K. seeks the help of Titorelli, the court painter. Titorelli agrees to help him, but is aware that the process is not favourable to people and Josef K. will find it difficult to get himself acquitted. K. decides to represent himself.

On his way to Huld’s to dismiss the lawyer from his case, he meets Rudi Block, another of Huld’s clients, who offers K. some advice. Block’s own case has been ongoing for five years and he has lost virtually everything in the process: money, his business, and his morals (he, too, is sexually involved with Leni).

Josef K. is tasked with accompanying an important Italian client to the city’s cathedral, where K. realises that the priest, rather than giving a general sermon, is addressing him directly. The two men discuss a famous fable (published separately as ‘Before the Law’), in which a doorman stands before a door leading to ‘the law’ but refuses a man entry.

The man waits by the door until the day of his death, when he asks the doorman why nobody else has tried to gain entry. The doorman then reveals that this door was meant only for that one man, and that he is now going to shut it.

The priest thinks this fable represents Josef K.’s situation, although many people have different ideas about what the story is supposed to mean, and K. and the priest disagree over its ultimate meaning. The day before Josef K.’s thirty-first birthday, two men arrive at his apartment and lead him outside, where they stab him to death, killing him ‘like a dog’.

The Trial : analysis

There is a literary-critical study by Mark Spilka, Dickens and Kafka: A mutal interpretation , which brings together the unlikely pairing of the modernist Kafka with the most popular of all Victorian authors.

Although this may strike us as a surprising comparison at first, Spilka shows that these two ostensibly very different writers actually share a great deal: their comic approach to the absurdities of life (even the tragedies of life), their childlike way of viewing the world’s injustices, and – perhaps more importantly for The Trial – their skewering of the endless and nonsensical bureaucratic processes that fill the corridors of law.

And Kafka is a comic writer, although he finds humour in the most tragic and unpromising situations, such as the sinister arrest of a man who has apparently done nothing wrong, and his subsequent execution.

In a sense, the English title by which Kafka’s novel is known, The Trial , conveys something of the double meaning of the original German title, Der Process : Josef K. is on trial for some unspecified crime, but Kafka’s novel exposes the absurd ways in which all life is a continual trial, ‘trying’ us by testing and challenging us, tempting us to commit things we shouldn’t and making us feel guilty even when we’re not sure precisely what we have done to feel such guilt.

All of this is tragic and hopeless, anticipating the dystopian futures of people like George Orwell but also the absurdist and existentialist writing of someone like Albert Camus, whose 1942 essay ‘ The Myth of Sisyphus ’ is an important text about the absurdity of modern life.

For Camus, Sisyphus is the poster-boy for Absurdism, because he values life over death and wishes to enjoy his existence as much as possible, but is instead thwarted in his aims by being condemned to carry out a repetitive and pointless task.

Such is the life of modern man: condemned to perform the same futile daily rituals every day, working without fulfilment, with no point or purpose to much of what he does. This might describe any of Kafka’s protagonists, whether Gregor Samsa of ‘The Metamorphosis’, Josef K. of The Trial , or K. from The Castle .

However, for Camus, there is something positive in Sisyphus’ condition, or rather his approach to his rather gloomy fate. When Sisyphus sees the stone rolling back down the hill and has to march back down after it, knowing he will have to begin the same process all over again, Camus suggests that Sisyphus would come to realise the absurd truth of his plight, and treat it with appropriate scorn. He has liberated his own mind by confronting the absurdity of his situation, and can view it with the appropriate contempt and good humour.

Although for many people Camus is all posing in overcoats and looking world-weary and miserable, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the grim comedy and stoicism that underscores his reading of the myth of Sisyphus. Similarly, many people who have never read Kafka believe that The Trial is a dark dystopian work, but that reveals only part of what the novel is about.

It is also a comedy, albeit a bleak one: Kafka’s friends reported that he laughed out loud while reading from the novel when he was working on it. Although the plot of the novel is pessimistic overall, the smaller situations we find within it, such as the numerous seductions of Josef K. by the women in the novel, are treated comically, bordering almost on farce.

Although Kafka’s Josef K. is less amused by his hopeless situation, it would be a mistake to overlook the absurd humour of The Trial , which could easily be dramatised as a sort of black comedy in which the protagonist is similarly thwarted as he seeks to clear his name. And like Dickens’s Circumlocution Office from Little Dorrit or the never-ending court case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce from Bleak House , the individual is helpless against the faceless and hidden forces that work within the great beast that is the legal system.

But if Kafka has affinities with Dickens, he can also claim descent from Dostoevsky, whose influence on The Trial he readily acknowledged. Dostoevsky’s understanding of the psychology of crime, punishment, and guilt feeds into Josef K. in Kafka’s novel, as does the Hasidic Jewish tradition of examining the nature of guilt and judgment. Indeed, Kafka is often analysed as a deeply religious writer, even though the settings for his work are normally secular.

Here, the significance of the cathedral, and Josef K.’s final conversation with the priest, become apparent. Although the priest is powerless to save Josef K. from his fate on earth, he can provide a more metaphysical and spiritual context for his understanding of guilt and acceptance. (It is arguably of deeply symbolic importance that Josef K. had previously sought help from both a lawyer and an artist, neither of whom could ultimately help him; perhaps religion may succeed where law and art fail, if only because religion takes us out of earthly or temporal concerns and into the heavenly and supernatural.)

The critic J. P. Stern attempted to define ‘Kafkaesque’ by using synonyms, ranging from ‘weird’ and ‘mysterious’ to ‘tortuously bureaucratic’ and even ‘nightmarish’ and ‘horrible’. Undoubtedly all of these terms are applicable, and all of them are relevant to an analysis of the mood and themes of The Trial .

Perhaps only ‘Orwellian’ can stand ahead of ‘Kafkaesque’ as a twentieth-century literary term which so sharply describes, and even shapes, our own thinking about our twenty-first-century world. As Stern observes, though, alongside ‘nightmarish’ we must also place ‘humdrum’: the ‘everyday quality’ of Kafka’s people and situations is indistinguishable from its horror.

Writing about totalitarianism later in the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt coined the term ‘the banality of evil’, to describe the unsettling fact that evil acts are not always carried out by ‘evil’ people, but are sometimes the result of bureaucrats who are dutifully following orders.

This is true even of Kafka’s most fantastical work, his novella ‘The Metamorphosis’. Everyone knows the famous opening line in which Gregor Samsa wakes up to find that he has been transformed into a giant ‘monstrous vermin’ or ‘beetle’ or ‘insect’ (depending on which translation of the German ungeheures Ungeziefer you’re reading), but the sentence or couple of sentences that follow that initial opening line reveal how closely the bizarre and the ordinary rub shoulders in Kafka’s fiction.

After the initial shock of discovering his transformation or ‘metamorphosis’, and within four paragraphs of this appalling change, Gregor is reflecting on the ‘irritating work’ that is his day job as a travelling salesman.

So it is with The Trial . Again, the work’s opening sentence is the most famous quotation in the whole book: ‘Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one morning.’

But what follows is not a nightmare tale of being locked up in a cell or put on ‘trial’ in the usual sense, with a jury and a courtroom and a dock. Instead, the ‘trial’ is the trial of day-to-day living and the sense of ordinary guilt which stalks many of us in our waking (and even, sometimes, sleeping) lives.

The Trial ( Der Process in Kafka’s original German-language text) was written in 1914-15 but, like much of Kafka’s work, remained unpublished until after his death. He commanded his friend Max Brod to burn all of his unpublished material (and even his published work!), for reasons which remain a mystery.

The main thing is that Brod refused to honour Kafka’s dying wish, seeing the slim body of work as an original contribution to literature and too important not to publish.

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Franz Kafka’s The Trial —It’s Funny Because It’s True

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

In Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial , first published in 1925, a year after its author’s death, Josef K. is arrested, but can’t seem to find out what he’s accused of. As K. navigates a labyrinthine network of bureaucratic traps—a dark parody of the legal system—he keeps doing things that make him look guilty. Eventually his accusers decide he must be guilty, and he is summarily executed. As Kafka puts it in the second-to-last chapter, “The Cathedral:” “the proceedings gradually merge into the judgment.”

Kafka’s restrained prose—the secret ingredient that makes this story about a bank clerk navigating bureaucracy into an electrifying page-turner—trades on a kind of dramatic irony. As the novelist David Foster Wallace noted in his essay “ Laughing with Kafka ,” this is Kafka’s whole schtick, and it’s what makes him so funny. By withholding knowledge from the protagonist and the reader , Kafka dangles the promise that all will be revealed in the end. But with every sentence the reader takes in, it feels increasingly likely that the reason for K.’s arrest will remain a mystery.

As The Trial follows its tragic path deeper into K.’s insular, menacing, and sexualized world, it gradually becomes clear that the answer was never forthcoming. In fact, Kafka hints at the narrator’s ignorance at the very beginning : “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” Why the conjecture about what “must have” happened unless the narrator, who relates the story in the past tense, doesn’t know? That ignorance sets up the humor: During certain particularly insane moments in K.’s journey, the frustration of not knowing why he’s enduring it all becomes unbearable, at which point there’s no choice but to laugh.

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Into the Unreal

Many commentators on The Trial have observed a sense of unreality in the novel, a feeling that something is somehow “off” that hangs like a fog over Kafka’s plotline. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, for instance, wrote in her well-known essay on Kafka : “In spite of the confirmation of more recent times that Kafka’s nightmare of a world was a real possibility whose actuality surpassed even the atrocities he describes, we still experience in reading his novels and stories a very definite feeling of unreality.” For Arendt, this impression of unreality derives from K.’s internalization of a vague feeling of guilt. That all-pervasive guilt becomes the means to secure K.’s participation in a corrupt legal system. She writes:

This feeling, of course, is based in the last instance on the fact that no man is free from guilt. And since K., a busy bank employee, has never had time to ponder such generalities, he is induced to explore certain unfamiliar regions of his ego. This in turn leads him into confusion, into mistaking the organized and wicked evil of the world surrounding him for some necessary expression of that general guiltiness…

In other words, Arendt reads The Trial as a kind of controlled descent into madness and corruption, ending in a violent exaggeration of the knowledge that nobody’s perfect.

The literary scholar Margaret Church expanded on these psychological themes in an article in Twentieth Century Literature , pointing to “the dreamlike quality of time values and the assumption of an interior time” employed throughout The Trial . According to Church, this unsteady temporality implies that most of what happens in The Trial isn’t real—or isn’t fully real, at any rate. In fact, she suggests, it makes as much sense to assume that “the characters are projections of K.’s mind.” Likewise, the literary scholar Keith Fort remarked in an article in The Sewanee Review that it’s “the nightmarish quality of unreality that has made Kafka’s name synonymous with any unreal, mysterious force which operates against man.” In other words, this type of unreality has become so closely associated with Kafka that the best word to describe it is, circularly, Kafkaesque .

License to Kafka

Writing in Critical Inquiry , however, the art historian Otto Karl Werckmeister charged that many Kafka interpreters, including Arendt, were engaging with a politicized fantasy of what Kafka represents, rather than with the real Kafka. For Werckmeister, this fantastical reading of Kafka’s life was best captured in Steven Soderbergh’s movie Kafka , which casts Jeremy Irons as “Kafka the brooding office clerk turned underworld agent”—a device that Werckmeister calls “Kafka 007” (after, of course, the James Bond franchise ).

Some of these interpreters were motivated by a desire to dismiss Kafka as a handwringing bourgeois do-nothing—or even a “pre-fascist.” Others expressed a willingness to excuse Kafka’s alleged “indifference to social policy” by appealing to his loose associations with socialist or anarchist circles. All of them, Werckmeister argues, are missing the obvious: They underestimate Kafka’s role as a lawyer at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute, in Prague, where he imposed workplace safety regulations on unwilling industrial employers:

Thus at the highest echelons of a semipublic, government-sanctioned institution enacting social policy, Kafka’s job was to regulate the social conduct of employers vis-à-vis the working class… The employers under Kafka’s supervision tenaciously resisted the application of recent Austrian social policy laws, which were adapted from Bismarck’s legislation in Germany. They contested their risk classifications, disregarded their safety norms, tried to thwart plant inspections, and evade their premium payments. The department headed by Kafka was pitted against them in an adversarial relationship, no matter how conciliatory the agency’s mission was meant to be.

Kafka’s tales are a reflection of the deep obstacles to progress he perceived in the social reality of his time. He even “anticipated the political self-critique of literature to the point of its nonpublication,” keeping most of his writing private, then asking that the manuscripts for The Trial and The Castle be destroyed upon his death (a wish that was, thankfully, not honored). But the critical focus has been trained on the received version of Kafka, an interpretation of his life derived under exigent circumstances—the eruption of fascism in Europe—for ideological purposes. It has been trained, so to speak, on the Kafkaesque, instead of on Kafka himself.

For Werckmeister, it’s true that Kafka’s fiction ultimately offers the most reliable guide to his political orientation, provided we understand that fiction in the context of his professional life. At work, he took the side of the working class—indeed, he represented its interests in a struggle against capital. He was “a man who tried to live his life according to principles of humanism, ethics, even religion.” As a direct result of that experience, he learned the disturbing truth that, in the law, “Lies are made into a universal system,” as he wrote in the penultimate chapter of The Trial . The best he could manage within the law still would be a far cry from real justice (which, Kafka also knew, would have to include sexual justice to be anywhere near complete).

Maybe Werckmeister is right about the political motives of critics like Arendt, but what about the plunging sense of unease—like a feeling of falling—that no one can quite seem to shake when they first encounter Kafka’s stories?

“It’s Funny Because It’s True”

I’m here to suggest, following Werckmeister, that this feeling results from the fact that Kafka’s stories, despite their bizarre premises, are unnervingly real . Although there is undoubtedly an element of the absurd in the worlds Kafka creates, his style—unpretentious and specific, yet free from slang—renders those worlds with such painful accuracy that they seem totally familiar while we’re in them, like déjà vu or a memory of a bad dream:

K. turned to the stairs to find the room for the inquiry, but then paused as he saw three different staircases in the courtyard in addition to the first one; moreover, a small passage at the other end of the courtyard seemed to lead to a second courtyard. He was annoyed that they hadn’t described the location of the room more precisely; he was certainly being treated with strange carelessness or indifference, a point he intended to make loudly and clearly. Then he went up the first set of stairs after all, his mind playing with the memory of the remark the guard Willem had made that the court was attracted by guilt, from which it actually followed that the room for the inquiry would have to be located off whatever stairway K. chanced to choose.

The time-bending nature of Kafka’s prose, then, shouldn’t be seen as a pathological formalism—a linguistically engineered unreality—but as a reflection of Kafka’s intuitive understanding of the emerging principles of modern physics, in which time itself is relative.

A 1956 article by the renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg suggests that a high-level awareness of modern physics defines and structures the modernist sensibility in art. While “there is little ground for believing that the current world view of science has directly influenced the development of modern art,” still “the changes in the foundations of modern science are an indication of profound transformations in the fundamentals of our existence.” Now that the cat is out of Schrödinger’s bag (or rather, box):

The old compartmentalization of the world into an objective process in space and time, on the one hand, and the soul in which this process is mirrored, on the other… is no longer suitable as the starting point for the understanding of modern science. In the field of view of this science there appears above all the network of relations between man and nature, of the connections through which we as physical beings are dependent parts of nature and at the same time, as human beings, make them the object of our thought and actions.

The “unreality” in Kafka that has captivated so many commentators is what best aligns, ironically, with the current scientific worldview, which sees its own understanding of reality as necessarily partial, limited, and relative. If time in The Trial seems nonlinear, that’s only because the novel is so thoroughly modern; the uneven flow of time in the novel captures the dawning scientific realization that time is neither absolute nor universal.

Isn’t it, after all, the sense that Kafka—the voice on the page—is firmly in touch with reality that makes it feel acceptable to laugh at the deranged goings-on in The Trial ? His jokes are technical achievements, yes, but they also speak to a feeling of loneliness that typifies the modern condition. Kafka himself couldn’t resist laughing when asked to read aloud from his work. To orchestrate this kind of laughter—to borrow a word from Wallace—might have offered relief from the relentless (and political) self-criticism that drove Kafka to conceal his writings. Kafka’s suppression of information gets us to let our emotional guard down. He contrives narrative tension so that he can shock us, confronting us anew with injustices to which we’ve become numb.

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Grasping the Human Nature: “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka Essay (Critical Writing)

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Literature has always been an integral part of human life. It appeared when a person tried to write down his/her personal feelings and emotions connected with a certain object and became one of the main remedies which helped to do it. That is why it is obvious that all important events in the life of people are reflected in literature. Additionally, literature can serve as the mirror, which helps to see peculiarities of the epoch in which certain work is created.

Being influenced by the beliefs topical for society at its current stage of development, authors have no other choice but to reflect them. However, at the same time, literature also touches some eternal themes which have always been topical for humanity, though they obtain some other meaning at the moment.

Such issues as relations between people, their attitude towards relatives, the influence of money on these relations, and the sense of human life, in general, have always been popular.

With this in mind, analysis of every literary work provides a great number of opportunities to understand human nature better and recognize their attitude towards these issues and compare this attitude with the modern one. Resting on these facts, analysis of the work The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka can provide a great number of opportunities for a better understanding of human nature.

First of all, it should be said that a good analysis of the work is impossible without a clear understanding of the character of its author and ideas peculiar to him. Franz Kafka is one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. He managed to create works atmosphere of which could shock a reader. Being raised under rather unusual conditions, he was able to embody his feelings in his works. They are imbued by absurd and fear of reality.

Additionally, the feeling of helplessness and insignificance can appear while reading his works. Kafka is known as one of the brightest representatives of existentialism. This term appeared to describe the beliefs of the group of philosophers and writers who considered that human existence was unique though absurd and senseless.

Every person has his/her own life in which he/she is free to live as he/she wants, though there is still a great fear of reality and recognition of absurdness of the life. That is why it becomes obvious that Kafka wanted to reflect these ideas in his works (Stephens, 2015), is a great admirer of this philosophic movement.

Under these conditions, The Metamorphosis can be taken as a good example of the embodiment of ideas of existentialism. The whole work is devoted to description of feelings and emotions of a person who suddenly discovered that he became an insect. There is no explanation of what the reasons for this transformation are and how it happened. One day, Gregor Samsa just makes this horrible discovery. Such an unusual setting, used by Kafka, just underlines indeterminism of human life.

The author wants to show that a person is forceless in the face of the world and reality, and everything can happen to him (Delahoyde, n.d). Samsa is not able to understand this change at once; however, gradually, he accustoms and is able to move and control his body. However, he is not able to live and survive. Being deprived of communication as his family refused him and, moreover, being injured, he dies alone, and his death remains almost unnoticed.

There is a great number of different themes touched by the author in this work. It is obvious that human existence and its senseless character are discussed here. However, Kafka also cogitates about such eternal issues as money, its influence on people, relations within the family, loyalty, and, additionally, complicated interaction between mind and body. That is why, being rather complicated work, The Metamorphosis suggests a great number of opportunities for its analysis.

As has already been stated, the issue of relations between mind and body is touched in work. Transformed into an insect, Gregor, however, saves the mind of a human being. Besides, at the beginning of the story, he could hardly speak as sounds which he produces are like “painful and uncontrollable squeaking” (Kafka, 1912, para. 7). Additionally, it is difficult for him to control his body “it turned out to be too hard to move; it went so slowly” (Kafka, 1912, para. 8).

Gregor still has his own mind though it is difficult for him to work under new conditions and rule a new body. However, in the course of the development of the story, it becomes easier for him to control his body. Gregor is able to climb and move his limbs. However, not only he influences it. The author also wants to show that the physical state of a person influences his mental abilities. Gregor’s behavior becomes more and more insect-like.

He prefers to remain in dark and tight spaces. Additionally, his preferences in food also change. The scene of the removal of furniture can serve as the culmination of this conflict. Being not able to control his instincts and determine what is better for him, Gregor leaves his room in a panic and receives a wound from his father. It is possible to say that the conflict between mind and body leads to the death of the main character.

Additionally, the issue of alienation can be seen here. It is obvious that the transform, which happened to Gregor, creates the barrier between him and the rest of the world. Being not able to communicate with his family or colleagues, the main character feels lonely and abandoned. However, this barrier can also be taken as the metaphor used by the author to show a reader a difference in the attitude towards people who differ from the majority of society (Batson, 2015).

Being a common traveling salesman, Samsa is taken as a member of it. He has colleagues and relatives who seem to like him and communicate with him. However, having become an insect, Gregor is ignored and deprived of any communication. Kafka shows readers the cruelty of society, which does not accept people who do not follow its rules or differ from its majority. Additionally, one more theme appears. The thing is that Gregor is also ignored by his family.

That is why the issue of relations between children and parents is also touched at work. Being the only person who earns money in the family, he is respected and loved. However, things change. The only person who now cares about Samsa is his sister Grete. Gregor is sure that “Grete would probably be the only one who would dare enter a room” (Kafka, 1912, para. 45).

The author also shows that even the love of parents and their attitude towards their child can be altered under the influence of some external factors. His parents do not try to understand or accept him, as it is still their child, though, in another body. However, being sure that society will reject this creature, they are not able to accept it too. Additionally, now, Gregor is dependent, and some money should be spent to feed him. The issue of money is also important here.

Being the only earner in the family, Gregor is appreciated and cared, though, now his transformation leads to his becoming one of the main reasons for the financial problems of the family because people, who rent rooms, refuse to live near Gregor. This fact makes the situation even worse as now family does not know how to survive, and even Grete, who is the only person who cares about Gregor, says to her father, “You’ve got to get rid of the idea that that’s Gregor.

We’ve only harmed ourselves by believing it for so long” (Kafka, 1912, para. 85). It becomes obvious that Grete refuses her brother. Though, it is possible to suggest that she lies. She is not sure that Gregor disappears. On the contrary, it is possible to assume that, being the only person who communicates with him, she knows that it is really Gregor, however, she prefers to forget about it as it is much easier to live in this way.

Having analyzed the story, it is possible to make a certain conclusion. Kafka manages to create an atmosphere of the absurdness of human life and the powerlessness of a person in the face of reality. Being deprived of communication, Gregor became a person who is not needed in society. That is why death was the only way out for him.

Batson, R. (2015). Kafka~Samsa . Reality Through Symbolism. The Kafka Project. Web.

Delahoyde, M. Kafka, The Metamorphosis . Web.

Kafka, F. (1912). The Metamorphosis . Web.

Stephens, J. (2015). Franz Kafka’s personal life reflected in the Metamorphosis . The Kafka Project. Web.

• Short Summary
• Chapter III
• Characters Analysis
• Symbols & Literary Analysis
• Important Quotes
• Author’s Biography‌
• The Story "Thank You, Ma'am" by Langston Hughes
• "The Odyssey" by Homer Discussion
• Social Issues in "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka
• Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”: Social Aspects
• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka: Cause and Effect
• Telemachus Journey From Boyhood to Hero: Homer's The Odyssey
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• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, May 5). Grasping the Human Nature: "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-metamorphosis-by-franz-kafka-critical-writing/

"Grasping the Human Nature: "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka." IvyPanda , 5 May 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/the-metamorphosis-by-franz-kafka-critical-writing/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Grasping the Human Nature: "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka'. 5 May.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Grasping the Human Nature: "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka." May 5, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-metamorphosis-by-franz-kafka-critical-writing/.

1. IvyPanda . "Grasping the Human Nature: "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka." May 5, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-metamorphosis-by-franz-kafka-critical-writing/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Grasping the Human Nature: "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka." May 5, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-metamorphosis-by-franz-kafka-critical-writing/.

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Critical essays on Franz Kafka

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• “Wallslogan,” in Snowpart (“Mauerspruch,” GW , 2:371), May 26.
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by Franz Kafka

The trial essay questions.

How is The Trial emblematic of the term "Kafkaesque"?

The term "Kafkaesque" refers to Franz Kafka's signature narrative sensibility, which often involves a solitary man trying futilely to escape an absurd and nightmarish situation. The Trial evinces Kafka's signature narrative sensibility as the story depicts Josef K.'s pointless attempts to fight an inscrutable court system that accuses him of an unspecified crime. Throughout the novel, K. is overpowered and exhausted by the complex and illogical bureaucratic organization of the court system, which ensures that he only ever comes into contact with low-level officials who carry out the whims of the court but claim to hold no power to influence the outcome of his trial. He tries to understand the system in order to beat it, but there is no possible end to the bureaucratic hierarchy in the world Kafka imagines. Ultimately, despite all his efforts, Joseph K. succumbs to the disorienting and nightmarish reality of his world. Worn down by the futility of his attempts at resistance, K. gives in to being executed for a crime that is never revealed to him.

Does Josef K. believe himself guilty of a crime?

In The Trial , Kafka establishes that the court is prosecuting Josef K. for a crime he has supposedly committed. However, the nature of the crime is never revealed to K. or the reader. When K. is informed of his arrest, he refuses to accept any charges laid out against him and questions the authority of this court he has never heard of but which everyone else seems to be familiar with. He decides to fight for his innocence, resolving to shake up the entire bureaucratic court system, pointing out the illogic of its charges. But despite his insistence on his innocence, the court's authority is pervasive, and its reputation for never changing its mind once a person is assumed guilty makes the absence of a specific crime irrelevant; whether or not K. has done anything wrong, he lives his life as a defendant presumed guilty. The effort K. expends in his futile refutation of the charges leads to his spirit of steadily wearing down. Although he doesn't believe himself guilty, as he has never learned what he is accused of, K. patiently goes along with the men sent to administer his execution. Regardless of whether he accepts the situation out of guilt or his inability to fight the system, K. dies with a sense of shame, suggesting that his personal feelings as to his guilt or innocence make no difference when his guilt has been decided by the higher authority of the court.

In what way is the prison chaplain's parable applicable to K.'s trial?

When K. meets the prison chaplain in the cathedral toward the end of the book, the chaplain recites a parable (previously published as a standalone story titled "Before the Law") about a man who spends most of his life waiting to enter a gate and gain access "to the Law." The guard tasked with keeping the man from entering reveals at the end of the man's life that the gate was specially made for him; the guard then closes the gate. While the parable invites a multiplicity of interpretations, it most directly parallels K.'s story in its theme of futility. The situational irony at the end of the parable establishes that the man's wait was pointless, just as K.'s efforts to fight the authority of the court are pointless. In both men's cases, any questions about the illogical nature of their predicaments are ignored. Their stories end with their deaths, which bring no additional clarity to their lives.

In what way could T he Trial be considered prescient?

Literary scholars have cited Franz Kafka's depiction of an oppressive and illogical bureaucracy exercising the power of life and death over the public as predicting the rise of fascist totalitarian governments in the twenty-year period following Kafka's death. While the court system in Kafka's novel differs from totalitarian governments in that, in most cases, fascist governments were democratically elected while the court seems simply to have arisen out of nothing, Kafka's vision of an unassailable and violent system of justice seems to foretell the emergence of fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, and several other European countries. The court's strict demands of compliance and the threat of sudden and arbitrary arrest or violence as punishment for no specified crime have clear parallels with the German Nazi party's violent persecution of Jews, homosexuals, Roma people, disabled people, and political opponents.

What roles does the concept of futility play in The Trial ?

As one of the novel's major themes, futility plays a central role in The Trial . As the novel progresses, K. is thwarted in his every attempt to influence the outcome of his trial. His inability to achieve any positive results from his efforts is made worse by the repeated assertions of other characters that K. will ultimately be unsuccessful in his attempts to sway the court. The guards who inform him of his arrest have no information about why he was arrested, but they insist K. must accept his fate and not try to fight back. Similarly, Titorelli tells K. he has never heard of a defendant achieving a dismissal, as the court is incredibly difficult to influence. Huld's nurse Leni insists that K. must confess his guilt if he hopes to escape his fate, even though he is ignorant of what he might be guilty of. The theme of futility is also present in the parable "Before the Law," which the prison chaplain discusses with K. The parable is about a man who waits his entire life to gain entry to the Law, only to discover that it was pointless to have waited because the guard had no intention of ever admitting him. Ultimately, it would seem that K. accepts the futility of his own life, as he goes along with the executioners with little protest.

The Trial Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Trial is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Explain the possible Biblical symbolism of what K. had for breakfast.

Chapter please?

WHO IS THE EXISTENTIALIST HERO IN FRANZ KAFKA'S "THE TRIAL"?

Joseph K. is the hero and protagonist of The Trial. I'm not sure what you need explained.

The Odyssey

I believe that would have been Athena.

Study Guide for The Trial

The Trial study guide contains a biography of Franz Kafka, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Trial
• The Trial Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Trial

The Trial literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Trial.

• Intimacy and Human Desire in The Trial
• Franz Kafka's Influences When Writing The Trial
• The Trial on Trial
• The Trial’s Account of Inevitable Failure and Death
• The Trial Analysis: The political, juridical and philosophical interpretations.

Lesson Plan for The Trial

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Trial
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Trial Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Trial

• Introduction