Born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, Frank Kafka was a Jew who came from a middle class earning family. During this time, Prague belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire. He was fluent in German and Czech, and all his work was written in German. Kafka had begun his career with chemistry after which, he pursued and acquired a degree in law from a German university in Prague. After completion of his degree, he got a job at an insurance institute for the Bohemian Kingdom. The job was not demanding, and thus, he had ample time to compose the stories. He then joined forces with two other writers, Felix Weltsch and Max Brod, where they formed a group of writers.
Kafka had most of his work unpublished, while others were never completed at the time of his death. However, his work as a writer has made a great influence from the 20th century. His most notable work is that of the metamorphosis story and several other which to date, they are considered to be great pieces of work from Kafka. Kafka got sick with tuberculosis, which was treated several but the condition did not get better. In 1924, Franz Kafka lost his life due to the disease. It is said that he died of starvation as the disease had affected his throat to the extent of being unable to swallow any food. In his last minutes of life, he asked his friend Max Brod to have all his works destroyed. However, Max did not heed to the wishes of a dying man, but rather, he ensured that they were published. He is responsible for putting Kafka on the world map of an influential writer because if he had destroyed the manuscripts, the stories would never have been known to exist.
Franz Kafka’s stories are mapped with weird situations such as wounds, torment, awkwardness, brutality, grotesques, and many other forms of hopelessness in life. According to an article in The Atlantic magazine, it discusses how Kafka’s work is criticized based on his life experiences. The author depicts Kafka’s stories as ones that are not pleasant in starting your day or good for bedtime stories due to the themes that surround them. Kafka was terrified by life; thus, becoming obsessed with death in his mind. He was a neurotic, insomniac, and the disease made him a food aficionado. He decided to channel these conditions in his life to the art of stories. He is believed to have experienced the greatest form of torture that a human being can inflict on himself.
In his book about Kafka, Heller describes him as a man who had developed an incomprehensible lucidness. Kafka’s work of art is poignant and disturbing to read as per literature understandings. He uses a language easy to understand and, at the same time, difficult to interpret in ideals situations. He is able to create a scenario where you may think you understand, but you really don’t. For instance, in one of his stories, he talks of a cage going to search for a bird. This leaves the reader in questions of how a cage could manage to go instead of the bird searching for it. It is as if saying that a house goes to search for a person, a very difficult to comprehend.
The aphorisms of Kafka are similar to his parables in his works. It is hard to exploit all the explanations that are there in his parables. Every reader comes up with a different opinion from the other. Also, every time you read the stories, there is a new explanation you get from what you thought previously. Saul Friedlander describes Kafka as a poet who is in his own league. Although he does not explain the meanings buried in Kafka’s work, he talks of his (Kafka) torture in life has been of a sexual perspective. Though not directly stated in his work, Friedlander seems to suggest that Kafka had been a homosexual in repression. Friedlander’s mentions of shame and guilt that Kafka has and this is a depiction of his hidden sexuality that he does not want it to be known. He even says that it was unlikely that Kafka had possibly given the thought of having a homosexual relationship.
Friedlander is adamant that there is a hidden secret in Kafka’s works that ought to be found. Kafka was keen to hide it so as not to be uncovered by his readers. Friedlander suggests that the secrets bring back the issue of sexuality that Kafka is hiding. He once pinpoints Kafka’s interest in young boys. Kafka gives a grimace representation of women depicting his minimal interests in them. Kafka talks of a boy with a wound on the side that suppurates worms, and according to Friedlander, he is criticizing a woman’s sexual organ. This shows that Kafka was not interested in the female gender. This instance affirms Friedlander’s critic that Kafka was being tormented by his sexual orientation as he tried to keep it as a secret.
Another author with a critic about Kafka is Jeremy Adler. Alder suggests that Kafka’s universality vision is stark and painful and comes from generality to the finer details. In Kafka’s works, there is a minimal description of the other characters that interact with the main character. Most of the places in the stories are also not given names, and this makes Alder believe that they may have been nightmares Kafka had. Kafka is resilient in giving most of the details that could enable the reader to try and figure out where the stories were possibly set. If he had mentioned and described the places, people could relate them to real places in the world, but this is not possible for he was very secretive of his work.
The author of this article gives a deeper look into Kafka’s life through his work, Letter to His Father. Kafka’s father, Hermann Kafka, is depicted to have been an oppressor who inflicted a permanent wound of low esteem to his son. This could be one of the inspirations that drove Kafka to write some of his stories due to the fear inflicted on him. Through this letter, Kafka’s work at Workmen Accident Insurance Institute was drudgery and gave him a taste of bureaucracy, also called Kafkaesque. Kafka was not good in love affairs with women, and this is shown through the relationships he had. He never got married until his death, and he never enjoyed life like other normal people as he spent most of his time writing stories in solitary nights.
Another interpreter of Kafka’s work, specifically on women and relationships, suggests that Kafka was writing about human nature. It is believed that Kafka was writing about the realities of life in a person at a specific age gap. It is not easy to describe how Kafka managed to give these stories in such an elaborate manner. Probably, the truth behind the motivation of Kafka to write may never be known to man, or a shred of new evidence will come up and unravel the mystery of the unknown. Despite many people trying to criticize his work, it is not possible to conclusively explain to him. Therefore, criticism will not work on his work, for we are probably not anywhere near unraveling the mysteries of the works or any other that may come up just like those who first read and got puzzled.
From the article, Kafka has been depicted to have different reasons for writing the stories. Each writer has his or her own opinion, thus making the work more confusing to understand. Every time you read a story, there is a possibility of coming up with a new theory of what motivated him to write. He was a cautious writer who ensured that he left questions in the reader’s mind without disclosing any secrets. This, therefore, brings the query of whether Kafka can be classified as a major writer or not. His work is a mastery of work, thus indicating that he is a professional, but there is no definite answer to the question, why? His descriptions of mysteries in life are fascinating and complicated to explain. Unlike other writers who are amazed by life mysteries, these were the daunting moments in Kafka’s life.
Having gone through the article and read the different views of several writers about Kafka and his work, I then compare his life and two of his works to see the similarities that are there to him. The first story is The Metamorphosis. This story talks of a man named Gregor Samsa, who wakes up from sleep only to find himself metamorphosed into a bug. The transformation of his body is attributed to the immense pressure inflicted on him by his family to meet their daily demands. Despite working so hard to meet the demands, nobody is showing concerns about his health. They are only interested in the financial support that he brings to the family and nothing else to the extent of not talking to him.
Gregor does not want to accept that he has metamorphosed, and thus, he continues to work hard each day. His worries are to fail in providing for his family and also turning late at the workplace. Having been alienated by other family members, he feels lonely and worthless to the world. He has nobody to share his predicaments within those dire moments, which leads him into a state of depression. When his family members realize of his transformation, they depict different emotions. Kafka rarely describes Gregor’s family members by names apart from his sister Greta who shows some little concerns initially. Later she is the one who advocated for Gregor to be thrown out when his health condition worsened. His father is a tough man who even inflicts injuries to Gregor. His death was a relief to all the family members as they had been released of a load of taking care of him.
Just like Gregor, Kafka’s life seems to concur with him in many aspects. In Kafka’s life, we are only aware of his working as a lawyer at Workmen Accident Insurance Institute. It is possible that he is the Gregor in the story. He worked hard as a lawyer to feed his Jewish family but was not appreciated by them. His family belonged to the second class in society. Gregor’s family also were of the second class. His father got a job after his death and continued to support the family. Kafka does not provide information about his family member in his life, just as he depicts Gregor. Gregor’s father was an emotionless man who even inflicted fear in his son. He has similar character traits as those of Kafka’s father, Hermann Kafka, who made his son feel worthless in life.
The metamorphosis of Gregor is an indication of his deteriorating health. He was not looked after since he lived a solitary life, and his death came as a relief. Kafka also got sick with tuberculosis. This disease was his metamorphosis in life, and since he lived a lonely life, there was nobody to take care of him, even his family. He died of starvation due to the disease-causing severe pain to his throat, and he could not swallow food. The whole story is a real reflection of Kafka’s life that he experienced since he was a child to his death.
The second story by Kafka is A Report to an Academy that gives the experience of an ape. The ape used to roam freely before it found itself in a cage aboard a boat to Europe. He was confined in a place where he could not free himself, and this led to him devising a mechanism to get a way out. Through this, he has to adapt to the human world and erase the wild behaviors of an animal. Today, he has managed to erase the animosity in him and no longer feels unhappy with his life. He has learned a lot that would have remained impossible if it was an ape. The past continues to fade away as he adapts to more humane ways.
Despite enjoying his life, there are reminders that make him remember the lost freedom he once had. The author depicts freedom and becoming human as intertwined; hence for the ape to be free, he has to become human. However, there are no depictions of the ape turning to a human being despite the efforts to achieve it. In this story, the author has described the apes past as what he used to be and the present; what he is struggling to becomes yet he is not.
It can be argued that this is another story that Kafka wrote and concerned about his life experiences. He is the ape in the story and has found himself in a new situation that he is unable to become. It is a representation of his past and present life. The cage is a depiction of a new world he has found himself in that requires him to work and provide for his family. Before, he was a free young man schooling, and now he needs to work as a lawyer to earn a living. Life at work is not easy, and he has to struggle every day. Kafka even tries to have relationships just like other people, but he is unable to sustain them. His struggle for freedom requires him to conduct himself like other people, but he cannot because of the permanent fear he got from his father when he was a child just as it is for the ape being tortured by its master.