Kafka: Modernist, Expressionist, Satirist, and Dark Existentialist

Max Carrillo. Period 4

Biography
• Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
• Born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, Bohemia (later Czechoslovakia), Franz Kafka was an
introverted, sickly, and shy boy who struggled to meet the expectations of a demanding father.
After receiving a law degree in 1906, Kafka began writing in earnest, publishing his stories in
the literary magazine of his good friend, Max Brod. Kafka died of tuberculosis on June 3, 1924,
in Austria. Kafka had directed Brod to burn all of his manuscripts. Brod ignored Kafka's wish
and, over the next few decades, edited and published all of the author's unfinished stories.
• Like many of the expressionists, Kafka was influenced by Nietzsche and Strindberg. His
writings, primarily novels and stories, depict an absurdist view of the world, which he describes
in paradoxically lucid terms. In the use of symbols and types, his stories often resemble
parables. Like Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of The Metamorphosis, Kafka's characters often
find themselves in the midst of an incomprehensible world, consumed with guilt and alienated
from those they love. The Trial, for example, a novel unfinished at the time of Kafka's death,
concerns a bank clerk who is arrested but never told the charges. He futilely attempts to
negotiate a Byzantine legal system to find the answer, but never does, and is finally killed "like a
dog." In modern times, the term "Kafkaesque" is used as an adjective suggesting something
possessing a complex, inscrutable, or bizarre quality.
•  All of his sister were killed in the concentration camps
The Trial-
• To the best of my knowledge, Kafka belonged to none of these anarchist
organizations but, as a man exposed and sensitive to social problems, he was
strongly sympathetic to them. Yet despite his interest in these meetings, given
his frequent attendance, he never took part in the discussions-
• 1. Arbitrariness: decisions imposed from above without any moral, rational, or
human justification while often making inordinate and absurd demands upon
the victim.
• 2. Injustice: blame is wrongly considered to be self-evident with no need for
proof, and punishment is totally disproportionate to the "mistake" (non-existent
or trivial). Big government is unwieldy, unfair, and unforgiving. In this
respect, The Trial is a visionary novel that warns civilization, wittingly or
unwittingly, of the coming tyranny of totalitarian governments in Nazi Germany,
Stalinist Russia, and Fascist Italy. It also attacks governments of every kind,
whether Democratic or otherwise
• The resemblance between the two accusations, condemnations and executions
betray the continuity which ties together the closed familial "totalitarianism"
with Kafka's grand visions.The difference between them is that in the two great
novels (The Trial and The Castle), there is a perfectly anonymous and invisible
"totalitarian" power at work.
The Castle [Das Scholb]
•  In it a protagonist, known only as K., struggles to gain access to the mysterious
authorities of a castle who govern the village for unknown reasons.
• Kafka died before finishing the work, but suggested it would end with the Land
Surveyor dying in the village; the castle notifying him on his death bed that his
"legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary
circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there".
• Dark and at times surreal, The Castle is about alienation, bureaucracy, and the
seemingly endless frustrations of man's attempts to stand against the system.
• Religious themes: One interpretation of K.'s struggle to contact the castle is that it
represents a man's search for salvation
• Political Themes: The castle is the ultimate bureaucracy with copious paperwork
that the bureaucracy maintains is "flawless". This flawlessness is of course a lie; it
is a flaw in the paperwork that has brought K. to the village. There are other
failures of the system which are occasionally referred to. K. witnesses a flagrant
misprocessing after his nighttime interrogation by Erlanger as a servant destroys
paperwork when he cannot determine who the recipient should be.
The Metamorphosis
• Economic effects on human relationships: Gregor is enslaved by his
family because he is the one who makes money. Thus, with the possible
exception of his sister, the family seems to treat him not as a member
but as a source of income.
• Family duty: The theme of family and the duties of family members to
each other drive the interactions between Gregor and the others.
• Guilt: Guilt stems from family duty, and is Gregor's most powerful
emotion. When he is transformed into an insect, Gregor is made unable
to work by circumstances beyond his control.
• Alienation: Before his metamorphosis, Gregor is alienated from his job,
his humanity, his family, and even his body, as we see from the fact that
he barely notices his transformation. In fact, even his consideration for
his family seems to be something alien to him, as he barely notices it
when he loses this consideration at the end. After his metamorphosis,
Gregor feels completely alienated from his room and environment and,
as a symbol of this, can't even see his street out the window. The
Metamorphosis, then, is a powerful indictment of the alienation brought
on by the modern social order.
THEMES
Social:
• Impulsivity with women
• Alienation
• Rejection
• Personal Struggles
• Hopelessness/Absurdity
Religious:
• Original sin
• Attaining salvation
• Kafka maintained his indifference to formal religion throughout most of his life. While he
had a sense of Jewish identity, this identity was complicated by a sense of alienation from
Judaism and Jewish life: "What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in
common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe."

Political:
• Disillusioned with politics/Big Government
• Disdain for public officials
• This theme, the ambiguity of a task's value and the horror of devotion to it
Kafka-In a nutshell (just for micheal
bonni)
• Existentialism has had ramifications in various
areas of contemporary culture. In literature,
Franz Kafka, author of haunting novels, walking
in Kierkegaard’s footsteps, described human
existence as the quest for a stable, secure, and
radiant reality that continually eludes it (Das
Schloss [1926; The Castle, 1930]); or he
described it as threatened by a guilty verdict
about which...