His work may be viewed psychologically, as an anxious son’s efforts to deal with an accusing father.
Neither Austrian nor Czech but Jewish, he was an outsider. His work may be read for its historical and social import as the reflections of a German Jew living in Czech Prague, a city under Austrian influence. In terms of literary form, Kafka’s stories most closely resemble the parable: simple yet enigmatic. This is partly a result of narrative technique: In limiting the narrative to the protagonist’s point of view, Kafka ensures that the reader will share his character’s bewilderment without benefit of an omniscient author. In Kafka’s fiction, every interpretation begets an alternative-one that may contradict its predecessor.
Franz kafka novels trial#
In this early story, as in The Trial and The Castle, the protagonist faces a judgment on himself, a fate in which the horrible and the absurd intertwine. With the story Das Urteil (1913, 1916 The Sentence, 1928 also as The Judgment, 1945), Kafka created the kind of fiction that characterizes his maturity, combining the unreality of dream states with images of startling vividness. For Kafka, humanity has only glimmerings of its formerly blessed state yet desperately attempts to recover it. When Eugene O’Neill’s hairy ape laments that “I ain’t in heaven, and I ain’t on oith, but takin’ the woist from both woilds,” he captured something of the spirit, if not the flavor, of Kafka’s tragic vision.
Kafka lived at the threshold of the modern technological world, and his stories are prophetic of the bewilderment and anxiety that typify modern frustrations and darkest moods: humans increasingly out of touch with their essential nature or, when confronted by totalitarian oppression, out of touch with society. The name Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) conjures up images of a world without a center, of people alienated both from society and from themselves.
0 kommentar(er)
