Franz Kafka Analysis

Franz Kafka did not attempt to write drama or poetry. His métier was prose. He was a perfectionist who apparently intended only a portion of what he had written for publication. The three novels and several more volumes of short stories were prepared for publication posthumously by the executor of his literary estate, Max Brod.

Kafka also wrote voluminously in other categories of prose that bear the same distinctive style as his creative work. His diaries and letters contain many comments that aid in the understanding of his stories, and his meticulous legal reports are exemplary professional documents.

Every year, more secondary literature is published about Franz Kafka than about almost any other author except William Shakespeare. This attests the extraordinary power and alluringly enigmatic content of his works. While his inimitable prose style describes everything as if it were self-evident, he invariably introduces elements of the fantastic and surreal and portrays the demise of his characters as inevitable. His works are imbued with a sense of horror as isolated characters struggle futilely against malign forces that they do not understand.

Kafka unintentionally became the voice of the age. Coming after the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, and being contemporary with the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, he captured the existential angst of the generation. As a result of the Industrial Revolution, the father no longer worked from the home but dominated the family from a distance. The figure of authority was a stranger.

In addition to long fiction, Franz Kafka (KAHF-kah) wrote numerous stories, the most famous of which are Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis, 1936), Ein Hungerkünstler: Vier Geschichten (1924; A Hunger Artist, 1948), and The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces (1948). He also left behind extensive diaries and letters.

What W. H. Auden wrote of Sigmund Freud—that he had become less a person than a climate of opinion—is equally true of Franz Kafka. He is the twentieth century prophet of alienation, his name a household synonym for “angst.” His stories—visionary, hallucinatory, yet very controlled artistically—have exerted their powerful influence over modern fiction. Few would dispute the assertion that he is one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. None of this, however, could have been anticipated of a writer who was not widely known at the time of his death.

Kafka’s genius was difficult for him to harness: The fact is that he never completed any of his three novels. Before dying, he left instructions with Max Brod, his friend and executor, to destroy his manuscripts. Reasoning that Kafka was not committed to their destruction as much as he was ambivalent over their fate—could not he have destroyed them had he really wished to do so?—Brod preserved the manuscripts, arranged to have them printed, wrote a biography of his friend, and generously championed his cause. Thus, The Trial and The Castle, books which so remarkably capture Kafka’s paradoxical vision of human existence, came to light.

Is The Trial merely motivated by Franz Kafka’s interest in the law or does it depend significantly on his legal training?

What are the obstacles to effective communication among Kafka’s characters?

How did Kafka’s difficulties with his own father affect his depiction of fathers?

Does Kafka’s fiction reflect an existentialist denial of all absolute principles?

Can any of the stories of The Country Doctor be regarded as optimistic?

Why do the reactions of fear and laughter seem to converge for Kafka’s readers?