“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
~ Franz Kafka.
Franz Kafka was German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. He was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family on July 3, 1883 in Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (presently the Czech Republic). He trained as a lawyer and after completing his legal education was employed full-time by an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis.
Kafka's unique body of work is regarded as one of the most influential in Western literature, despite the fact that much of it is incomplete and was mostly published posthumously. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe situations like those found in his writing.
His stories include "The Metamorphosis" (1912) and "In the Penal Colony" (1914), while his novels are The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927). All of Kafka's published works, except several letters he wrote in Czech to Milena Jesenská, were written in German. Kafka's first language was German, but he was also fluent in Czech. Later, Kafka acquired some knowledge of the French language and culture; one of his favorite authors was Flaubert.
Kafka's writing attracted little attention until after his death. During his lifetime, he published only a few of his works. In his will, Kafka instructed his executor and friend Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works, including his novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, but Brod ignored these instructions. Brod, in fact, would oversee the publication of most of Kafka's work in his possession, which soon began to attract attention and high critical regard.
Kafka's work has influenced a vast range of writers, critics, artists, and philosophers during the 20th and 21st centuries. The poet W. H. Auden called Kafka “the Dante” of the twentieth century.
Discussion Questions :
When reading Kafka's works, the reader appears to have two options for reading Kafka. One is to regard Kafka's world as a dream vision of our own predicament, replete with parables and symbols that have been amplified and outrageously deformed (and so vastly more real). The second option is to abandon any pretense of understanding his world and immerse oneself in its atmosphere of haunting fear, visionary bizarreness, and — on rare occasions — vague hints of hope.
Discuss your thoughts on the subject.
Is it irrelevant and pointless to approach Kafka's literature with the attitude of rationally explaining them??
What, in your opinion, are the traits in Kafka's thinking that one could label as "existentialist"? What are your best - loved existentialist works of literature?
Which work or quotation by Franz Kafka is your top pick??
Always open to additional comments and discussions on Franz Kafka and his works.
If there is another author you would like to see a discussion on, please post your suggestion in the comments below for a chance to be featured in a future chapter!