"The Metamorphosis" author Franz

Usage examples of kafka.

After Gregor Samsa's incarnation, Kafka showed a fondness for naked heroes -- animals who have complicated and even pedantic confessions to make but who also are distinguished by some keenly observed bestial traits -- the ape of "A Report to an Academy" befouls himself and his fur jumps with fleas.

Franz Kafka wrote continuously and furiously throughout his short and intensely lived life, but only allowed a fraction of his work to be published during his lifetime.

Sixty years after his death, Kafka epitomizes one aspect of this modern mind-set: a sensation of anxiety and shame whose center cannot be located and therefore cannot be placated.

This volume holds all of the fiction that Kafka committed to publication during his lifetime:* a slender sheaf of mostly very short stories, the longest of them, "The Metamorphosis," a mere fifty pages long, and only a handful of the others as much as five thousand words.

The little canon that Kafka reluctantly granted posterity would, indeed, stand.

Predictably: while Kafka was alive Brod had often elicited manuscripts from his excessively scrupulous friend and was instrumental in the publication of some few of them.

The failure is purely mechanical and we do not feel cheated, since the story's burden of private meaning has been unloaded -- there are scarcely any pages in Kafka more sweetly and winningly autobiographical than these.

His manuscripts show Kafka to have been a fervent worker, "scribbling" (as he called his writing) with a stately steadiness across the page, revising rather little, but ceasing when authenticity no longer seemed to be present, often laying down parallel or even contradictory tracks in search of his prey, and content to leave his works in an "open" state like that of his Great Wall -- their segments uncertainly linked, strange gaps left, the ultimate objective shied from as if too blindingly grand.

Hearing Kafka read aloud from his youthful works "Description of a Struggle" and "Wedding Preparations in the Country" instantly convinced Max Brod that his friend was a genius: "I got the impression immediately that here was no ordinary talent speaking, but a genius.

And in truth Kafka, though heterosexual, charming, and several times engaged, and furthermore professing that "Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come [is] the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all," never did manage to get married.

The charm that these disquieting, abortive early pieces exerted upon Brod and other auditors (for Kafka used to read his work aloud to friends, sometimes laughing so hard he could not continue reading) must have largely derived from the quality of their German prose.

Music will again be felt, by mice and dogs, as an overwhelming emanation in Kafka's later fables -- a theme whose other side is the extreme sensitivity to noise, and the longing for unblemished silence, that Kafka shared with his hero in "The Burrow.

Hermann Kafka -- "the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority" -- was a butcher's son from a village in southern Bohemia.

But Hermann Kafka cannot be blamed for having become in his son's mind and art a myth, a core of overwhelming vitality and of unappeasable authority in relation to which one is hopelessly and forever in the wrong.

But the seeds of such vast evil were present in the world of the Emperor Franz Josef, and Kafka was, we should not forget, a man of the world, for all his debilities.