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Magill's Survey of World Literature Franz Kafka Born: Prague, Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Czech Republic); July 3, 1883 Died: Kierling, Klosterneuburg, near Vienna, Austria; June 3, 1924 Notable for their spare, unadorned prose style, Kafka's short stories and three novels lead deep into the subconscious and expose the fears from which all people suffer to some extent. Biography Franz Kafka (KAHF-kah) was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague (now in the Czech Republic), the first child born to Hermann and Julie Kafka. A second son died in infancy, leaving Franz as the only son, with three younger sisters. Kafka reacted negatively to his paternal forebears. His grandfather had been a butcher, something that Kafka found so repugnant that he became a vegetarian. His works contain descriptions of meat and wounds that reflect this revulsion. His father was in business and owned his own shop, but Kafka was permanently bothered by his gruff and insulting treatment of his employees. This recollection is perhaps reflected in Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis, 1936), in Gregor Samsa's description of the hostile and suspicious chief clerk. Kafka's mother was unable to give him the attention that he would have liked, since she also worked in the store, but Kafka felt more affinity with her side of the family, particularly with his bachelor uncles, one of whom, Siegfried Lowy, was a country doctor. Despite his childhood fears of failure, Kafka progressed effortlessly through school and went on to earn his doctorate in law at the German University in Prague. After a brief placement with one firm, which he left because of the abusive language in the office, Kafka found his permanent employment with the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, where his function was deemed so essential that he could not be drafted for active service in World War I. The war years were among the most tumultuous and productive in Kafka's life. In Europe, there was a pervasive atmosphere of decadence and disillusionment. Five hundred years of Habsburg rule were drawing to a close, and the war would culminate in the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During these years, Kafka spent much time agonizing over his relationship to Felice Bauer, whom he had met in August, 1912, and to whom he had proposed in June, 1913. It was mainly an epistolary association. Bauer did not live in Prague, and she and Kafka often had disagreements when they met. Reflecting the prejudices of his background, Kafka regarded marriage and a family of one's own as de rigueur in one sense, but he was also increasingly aware of his calling as a writer, and he did not see how he could find the time to combine the two. In July, 1914, he and Bauer broke off their engagement, but the letters continued, and in July, 1916, they became informally engaged again. This second engagement was made official in July, 1917, and broken off again in December of the same year. It was during his preoccupation with Bauer that Kafka wrote, among other things, The Metamorphosis, Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937), and a short-story collection Ein Landarzt: Kleine Erzählungen (1919; The Country Doctor, 1945). Kafka's stated reason for breaking off the second engagement was that he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. He had suffered a severe hemorrhage, leading the cleaning lady to comment that he was not long for this world. In fact, he lived another seven years, and aside from taking several leaves of absence and then early retirement from his firm, he did not slow his pace at all. He met other women. In 1919, he became engaged to Julie Wohryzek, who also had tuberculosis, but broke off this engagement when they did not get the lease for the apartment that they had wanted. In 1920, he had an affair with Milena Jesenká-Polak, who was translating his stories into Czech. She was intellectually and artistically compatible with him, but she broke off the relationship, saying she could not leave her husband despite his harsh treatment of her. In July, 1922, Kafka went to stay with his youngest and closest sister, Ottla, at her home in the country. It was there that he wrote the first nine chapters of Das Schloss (1926; The Castle, 1930) in a matter of a few weeks. Only in the last year of his life, in September,1923, did Kafka finally overcome his considerable inhibitions and move in with a woman in Berlin. He was forty; Dora Dymant was nineteen. Kafka bequeathed his literary estate to his friend and fellow writer Max Brod, instructing him to continue the work Dora had begun of burning the manuscripts. Brod instead ensured that all of Kafka's remaining works, diaries, and letters were published. Kafka died on June 3, 1924, at the sanatorium in Kierling, near Vienna, Austria. Analysis Kafka is probably the only author who has treated such profound subject matter without couching it in poetic language. His unadorned style, consistently simple syntax, and workmanlike prose present the subject matter in such a lucid and accessible manner that the works speak persuasively to the inner psyche. They remain disturbing and enlightening excursions into the nature of the self that are valid for all time. The human psyche is Kafka's main topic, not political or social commentary, and not specifically autobiography, although clearly his was the mind he knew best. While it is helpful for the reader to have some knowledge of his biography, of Prague, of the time in which Kafka lived, and of concurrent intellectual developments, it is not essential. The works transcend Kafka's immediate situation. They have been translated into numerous languages and are effortlessly understood as masterpieces by every culture in which they are read. If one wishes to place Kafka's works in intellectual history, the two concurrent developments that show the closest similarities with his style are psychoanalysis and science fiction. Psychoanalysis, pioneered by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, emphasized the importance of dreams, which spring from the subconscious, for revealing the deeper reality of life. Many of Kafka's works have a dreamlike quality and, according to him, seemed to write themselves. The magnificent short story "Das Urteil" (1913, 1916; "The Sentence," 1928; better known as "The Judgment," 1945), for example, was written in one sitting during an evening in September, 1912. Although very pleased with the work, Kafka did not know what it meant. He did not consciously attempt to create symbolic works, and that is precisely why they are so rewarding to experience. Kafka intuitively knew what was right, but he left it to others to decipher his work. Science fiction, in a more deliberate manner, imports the same departure from linear reality that characterizes dreams. Time and space may be infinitely contracted or expanded, and it is not unusual for mythical beasts to appear. A founder of science fiction, the man who invented the word "robot," was Karel Capek, also a Czech. H. G. Wells was writing in Britain at the same time. In Kafka's short story "Ein Landarzt" ("The Country Doctor"), for example, unearthly horses transport the doctor a distance of ten miles in an instant, but the return journey is interminable. Such effects, though, are subsidiary to Kafka's main topic. Although on the verge of speculative fiction, he is not writing about the supernatural per se but about the human psyche, the utterly natural. Kafka was also unavoidably influenced by the spiritus mundi, the zeitgeist, or spirit of his time, but not in such a way as to date his works. As a Jew in a city where there were race riots, as the subject of a dynasty in decline, Kafka captured the prevailing feeling of uncertainty and helplessness, and he observed without judgment. No doubt his extensive legal training was also operative in forming his technique of impartially describing conflicting viewpoints. Even in Kafka's cathartic Brief an den Vater (wr. 1919, pb. 1952; Letter to His Father, 1954)--which he delivered to his mother--he was able to understand in all fairness how his behavior must have seemed from his father's point of view. Thus, the characters in his works are seldom portrayed bluntly as either good or bad, right or wrong. They are three-dimensional and as complex as any human being. Even the antagonists may turn out to be right. Kafka's stories are not written with the interpretive wisdom of hindsight but with the urgency and uncertainty of current experience. The omission of a clear verdict on any specific character or situation also enables Kafka's works to be understood on more than one level. Frequently, his apparent catastrophes are not catastrophes at all but liberating measures necessary for transcendence. It is always the hardworking white-collar professional who meets his demise: the businessman Georg Bendemann in "The Judgment," the banker Josef K. in The Trial, and the doctor in "The Country Doctor." Taken purely as story, these appear to be tragic fates. The men fall victim to forces beyond their control and either self-destruct, or allow themselves to be destroyed, or cannot prevent themselves from being destroyed. Their common type, however, indicates that they may, on another level, be representative of someone who needed to be removed, of Kafka the lawyer, who repeatedly took precious time away from Kafka the writer, who was in ascendance. As in the later Greek dramas, the tragedy of the flesh can be read as the beginning of the ascendance of the spirit, or, perhaps more appropriately to Kafka, the self. The spirit of the artist rises phoenixlike from the absurd and often contrived demise of the businessperson. Kafka often expressed the wish to dedicate himself to his writing, and it seems he portrayed its fulfillment in some of his works. To understand the rich, multiplex statements about the reality of the self in Kafka, it is frequently necessary to see several characters as different aspects of the main protagonist. A modified psychoanalytical approach may prove useful in this context. In "The Judgment," for example, one can see a weak ego (the friend in Russia) torn between the desires of the id (Georg Bendemann) and the dictates of the superego (the father figure). Eventually, the id is suppressed (drowned), the superego may relax (collapse), and, by implication, the ego will flourish (be able to write). All this sounds oppressively grim, and indeed, on first reading, many of Kafka's works do seem horrible and depressing. The fatalism of most of his characters, though, which Kafka only began to counter with The Castle, is always offset in tone by careful choreography and by a splendid sense of humor that appreciates the ridiculous in all that humanity does. When reading his stories aloud, Kafka and his listeners were frequently overcome with laughter. It is his ethereal laughter that melts "the frost of this most unhappy of ages" ("The Country Doctor"), ensuring not only endless fascination with Kafka but also his relevance for all time. The Trial First Published: Der Prozess, 1925 (English translation, 1937) Type of Work: Novel Arrested on his thirtieth birthday, Josef K. battles with an unusual court for a year before allowing himself to be executed without a proper trial. The Trial was begun in July, 1914, when Kafka turned thirty-one. He had just broken off his first engagement to Felice Bauer. He had also been unable to write any literature for more than a year, and he was feeling simultaneously frustrated by this writer's block and guilty for having been unfair to either Bauer or himself (depending on how one looked at it). Out of this inner turmoil arose The Trial, which was completed within six months. Like all Kafka's writing, The Trial achieves a fine balance between the real and the imagistic, containing enough references to everyday life that the reader is initially tempted to confront the content of the surface story with logical argumentation. Were this a standard crime story, one would say that K., who was a banker by profession, misses three excellent opportunities to save himself. At the beginning of the novel, when arrested without being told why, K. neglects to contact his friend the public prosecutor. In the middle of the novel, when it would help to get away for a while, K. turns down his uncle's invitation to stay with him in the country. At the end of the novel, K. avoids the policeman, who clearly wants to intervene. The premise of fantasy, though, is that it details inner reality. Kafka was involved in coming to terms with himself, and he presents the reader with strong evidence that K. and the court are one and the same. Names are always significant in Kafka's works, and one of the two warders who arrests Josef K. on his thirtieth birthday is called Franz--that is, the reader is to understand, Franz Kafka. Josef K. subsequently complains to the Examining Magistrate about the man's behavior and is surprised, on leaving the bank an evening or two later, to hear moaning coming from behind a door he has never opened. To K.'s astonishment, there are the two warders about to be flogged by a third man with a birch, and K. watches as Franz is flogged senseless. On his way home the next day, K. opens the door of the room again: "What he saw, instead of the darkness he had been expecting, destroyed his self-possession completely. Everything was exactly the same, just as he had found it the evening before when he opened the door. The old files and ink-bottles just inside the door, the Flogger with his birch, the warders still completely undressed." Clearly, it is all in K.'s mind, for he must be present for the scene to continue. What is happening to K., then, is an inner sorting of priorities. What is on "trial" is Kafka's own lack of existential authenticity. At the time that he wrote The Trial, Kafka had already realized that Bauer would have been more of a hindrance in his life than a help. Her counterpart in the novel is Fräulein Bürstner (same initials), who does not wish to get involved with K. The other aspect of Kafka's life that necessarily continued to interfere with his writing was his professional work as a lawyer with the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute. This situation is analogous to K.'s workaday existence in the bank. Kafka the writer must have derived great satisfaction from placing on trial and sentencing to death that aspect of his life that was guilty of wasting his time, but that he nevertheless needed. Der Prozess is translated into English as "the trial" or "the process." In fact, no trial takes place in the novel, so the reader might do well to consider the other meaning of the title. Hegelian and post-Hegelian German philosophy, with which Kafka was familiar, made use of the Greek terms "process" and "praxis" to describe contrasting modes of existence. "Process" imports the notion of an implacable system wherein one is acted upon by forces one does not understand and cannot alter. Surely this is the case of Josef K. in The Trial. "Praxis," the opposite of "process," is an act of taking control of one's own destiny, and that is what the more mature protagonist of the same name, K., undertakes to do in Kafka's later novel, The Castle. The Castle First Published: Das Schloss, 1926 (English translation, 1930) Type of Work: Novel K. is summoned by the Castle to work as a land surveyor, but, on arrival, he is unable to determine why he was called. The Castle is unfinished. It breaks off after the twentieth chapter, with alternative versions in the manuscript indicating that the plot could have continued in two different directions. Critics have tended to be led by Max Brod's report of how Kafka once told him the novel was to end: The Land-Surveyor was to find only partial satisfaction and die exhausted by his struggle. If this is taken as a foregone conclusion, the interpretation is necessarily partial to the dark and depressing aspects of the novel. From an impartial reading of the story, though, it seems equally possible that K., the outsider, could usher in the triumph of reason over the hopelessly entangled and inefficient bureaucracy of the Castle. The first reading, which ends with K.'s defeat, is consistent with many of Kafka's earlier works and seems to echo the short parable "Vor dem Gesetz" (1915; "Before the Law," 1930) included in The Trial, in which the man from the country exhausts all of his resources and eventually dies in the futile attempt to gain admittance to the Law. An essential difference between the characters in the earlier works and the protagonist in the last novel, though, is that K. neither reveres nor is intimidated by the Castle and its agents, and he has a refreshing tendency to speak his mind. Kafka wrote The Castle during the last two years of his life, during which he overcame many inhibitions. It is this new spirit and confidence that seems to speak through K. in the second reading, which emphasizes his chances of success. It is difficult for the objective reader to take the Castle seriously. Desirable apparently only because it is inaccessible to the common individual, it is a disappointment from the start, to K.'s eyes not a castle at all but "only a wretched-looking town, a huddle of village houses, whose sole merit, if any, lay in being built of stone; but the plaster had long since flaked off and the stone seemed to be crumbling away." Furthermore, there is little evidence of the Castle's having actually done anything for the people in the village. Its "gentlemen" are unprincipled and adept only at keeping the best for themselves. First the Mayor's house, then the Herrenhof are shown to be awash in paperwork, with files hopelessly outdated and no order to the system. How, then, does the crumbling Castle manage to retain its control over the villagers, indeed command their respect, devotion, and services? First, it maintains a cloak of secrecy around its activities, if any, and tolerates no outsiders. It is a closed system whose preeminence goes unchallenged. Second, it terrorizes those who refuse to be exploited, as evidenced by Amalia's case. Third, it moves quickly to try to bring any active newcomers alongside. K. is told that no surveying will be necessary and is presented with two ridiculous assistants whose purpose is to keep him distracted. Then he is sent a letter congratulating him on the fine land surveying he and his assistants are doing, thereby tempting him to do nothing but maintain appearances, like the rest of the Castle's employees. From the start, though, K. does not seem like the sort to surrender. In the second chapter, in a significant flashback to his childhood, K. remembers how he was one of the few boys who managed to climb the high wall around the graveyard. "The sense of that triumph had seemed to him then a victory for life." This scene establishes his personality. In the village, K. refuses to be browbeaten and manipulated, and he persists in trying to force an interview with Klamm to get to the root of why he was summoned. In the thirteenth chapter, one of the students approaches and offers help, believing that K. in the distant future will "excel everybody." Finally, in the eighteenth chapter, K. barges in on Bürgel, one of the "gentlemen" secretaries in the Herrenhof, only to fall asleep to the drone of Bürgel's voice. Critics who subscribe to a defeatist reading of The Castle interpret K.'s falling asleep as a great opportunity lost, for K. could conceivably have gained access to the Castle through Bürgel, whose name is the diminutive of the German word Burg, or castle. By this point in the novel, though, the Castle and its representatives have been exposed as so corrupt that K.'s overwhelming desire to sleep can be seen as a natural defense mechanism. K. dreams that he has already achieved a great victory by fighting against and banishing a naked secretary built like a Greek god, and this dream seems to be prophetic. There is every indication that K. will overcome the Castle. The main interpretive question is what the Castle represents. Surely it embodies the reality of all persons and institutions girded in cloaks of illusory authority, from the church to the village teacher, and lampoons the tricks and devices of those whose interests are served by the perpetration of grand fraud. Kafka was concerned with eternal verities, which was what made him a great writer. The K. in this work has identified the mysterious "Law" and its authority structures by which the K. of The Trial was oppressed, and he finds that it is a sham and a chimera. He laughs at it. The Metamorphosis First Published: Die Verwandlung, 1915 (English translation, 1936) Type of Work: Short story Commercial salesman Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to find himself turned into a large bug, which forces his dependent family to become self-sufficient. The Metamorphosis is Kafka's longest story and one of his most frequently analyzed works. Tripartite in form, it traces the months from Gregor Samsa's unique metamorphosis to his death from dehydration, injury, and general neglect. Gregor's health declines as the health of his father, mother, and sister improves. His metamorphosis from the sole breadwinner to an utterly dependent and undesirable creature prompts the metamorphosis of his sluggish family into hardworking, happier people. The point is often made that, although it is Gregor who takes on a grotesque form, the real ugliness in the story lies in his family's attitude toward and treatment of him, in their assumption that he is responsible for the debt incurred by his father. As the parents and sister selfishly exploit the best years of Gregor's youth, any possibility he might have of marrying and establishing a family of his own is reduced to his making a fretwork frame for a magazine picture of a woman. They have used him up. Likewise, his employer shows no appreciation for Gregor's humanity and seems bent only on getting the maximum return from his employee. After five years without missing a day, Gregor needs only to miss one train to have the chief clerk threaten him with dismissal. They also use him up. The integrity of Gregor's self is under attack from all sides. Not even his bedroom is a safe retreat. It has doors in all three inside walls, enabling his mother, his father, and his sister to question him simultaneously. No wonder, then, that Gregor revolts. He takes on a form that makes his further exploitation impossible. Kafka explicitly forbade any artistic illustration of the bug for the book cover. That would have given too mundane a form to a transformation that signifies a revolt of the subconscious, a breakthrough after a long period of self-denial. Gregor entertains the idea that the same may happen to the chief clerk himself some day. Significantly, the title of the story is not The Bug but The Metamorphosis. The emphasis is on the change itself, on exploring who one really is and what one really likes to do, on being guided by one's own urges, with no worry concerning where they will lead. Gregor discovers that he feels most comfortable squeezed under the sofa or hanging upside down from the ceiling. His voice changes, so that his speech is unintelligible to humans. He is ravenously hungry, but not for human food. He is moved as never before by his sister's violin playing. "Was he an animal, that music had such an effect upon him? He felt as if the way were opening before him to the unknown nourishment he craved." Gregor's new sensitivity to music and the new sound of his words are clear indications that the story may be read as the self-discovery of the artist. Kafka does not downplay the risk inherent in eccentric self-expression. Part 1 of the story ends with Gregor's sustaining an injury along his side as his mulish father forces him back into his room. Part 2 ends with Gregor sustaining a more serious, perhaps fatal wound, as his father pelts him with apples. Part 3 ends with Gregor dead, covered with refuse and dust, and disposed of by the cleaning lady. The danger, clearly, of voluntary or involuntary nonconformity is that one may be misunderstood, mistreated, or entirely rejected. Before his metamorphosis, though, Gregor was no better off than after it. While the manifestation of his uniqueness was considered by some to be grotesque, it was an advance over his former routine. The Country Doctor First Published: Ein Landarzt, 1919 (English translation, 1945) Type of Work: Short stories These fifteen stories reflect on the human condition, on the uncertain spirit of the time during World War I, and on the nature of the artist. The Country Doctor is a collection of stories written between 1914 and 1917. The order of the stories was determined by Kafka, who decided to withdraw the fifteenth story, "Der Kübelreiter" ("The Bucket Rider"), before publication. The questions addressed in the stories are existential. Human society is so far removed from the natural state that it at times seems to have become lost in its own rules and bureaucracy. Old institutions no longer command respect and take up too much precious time. Behind these general observations, which were certainly true in the declining days of the Habsburg monarchy, there is in Kafka's works always the autobiographical element, the realization that his writing was the most important thing in his life, and the resentment of his professional obligations as a lawyer and of his fiancé Bauer as diversions from his main objective. Kafka's story sequence establishes a framework whereby the collection opens with a story of a horse in a law firm and ends with one in which an ape delivers "Ein Bericht für eine Akademie" ("A Report to an Academy"). This framework operates to strip away any veneer of respect one may still entertain for these institutions, and, in a masterful kind of "reverse anthropomorphism," it compares humans unfavorably with animals. What is done to animals is not to their benefit. The female chimpanzee has "the insane look of the half-broken animal in her eye." By extension, Kafka seems to be questioning the benefit of what humankind is doing to itself, of the jobs that keep people occupied through the best years of their lives, causing them to conform to hierarchical constructs that deny and suppress their inner selves. Yet the thought of usurping civilization's rigorous and often dehumanizing controls and structures gives rise to the fear of a relapse into barbarianism. "Ein altes Blatt" ("An Old Manuscript") describes what happened when the nomads assumed power. "Schakale and Araber" ("Jackals and Arabs") cleverly portrays the logical fallacies inherent in the plans for most uprisings, and it identifies the real problem as the nature of the beast rather than the situation. Some of the stories portray characters overcome by inertia, while others deal with the inability to overcome mortality. Offsetting these, however, are the two death stories that seem, ironically, infused with energy and a sense of purpose. In "Ein Brudermord" ("A Fratricide"), the man who is killed is the one who is a conscientious office worker. Is Kafka wishfully clearing his time-consuming professional life out of the way? In as immediate a style, "Ein Traum" ("A Dream") portrays the burial alive of Josef K., who is also the protagonist in Kafka's novel The Trial. While Josef is alive, the artist engraving the tomb has difficulty writing, but as soon as Josef is wafted down into a great hole, his own name races across the tombstone "in great flourishes." An autobiographical reading of these stories is that Kafka's involvement in his own life lacks authenticity for him and that aspects of his self need to be excised. The indication of where he belongs is given in the brilliant short piece "The Bucket Rider." In it, a freezing man comes to the realization that there is no help for him in this world, and he ascends by supernatural means into the "regions of the ice mountains." This image is a metaphysical removal from the world. Kafka withdrew "The Bucket Rider" from the collection, perhaps because its message was more elaborately stated in the title story, "The Country Doctor." In this story, the most beautiful and most fantastic of all, Kafka symbolically discards both the profession and the fiancé. The doctor loses his practice and his maid. Instead, he is transported by supernatural means to the bedside of a sick boy, who has a blossom in his side, an unsightly wound that he brought into the world as his only dowry and of which he will die. That is the gift of the artist, which is of consuming magnificence, transporting its owner into the world of the spirit. Summary Franz Kafka is uncontestedly one of the strongest, most original literary voices of the twentieth century. His unpretentious prose, while seemingly rooted in the everyday, penetrates deeply into the reality of the human psyche. All rings true on the psychological level, bizarre though the scenes and circumstances of the narrative may be. Moral precepts shimmer in the distorting light of multiple interpretations, for the works are absolute and support many different interpretations. Like dreams, Kafka's writing is both fantastic and vividly entertaining and evokes powerful emotional responses ranging from fear to sustained laughter. He was unique, a sovereign artist, a writer for all time. Jean M. Snook Bibliography: By the AuthorLong Fiction Der Prozess, 1925 (The Trial, 1937) Das Schloss, 1926 (The Castle, 1930) Amerika, 1927 (America, 1938; better known as Amerika, 1946) Short Fiction: Betrachtung, 1913 (Meditation, 1948) Das Urteil, 1913, 1916 (The Sentence, 1928; also as The Judgment, 1945) Die Verwandlung, 1915 (The Metamorphosis, 1936) "In der Strafkolonie," 1919 ("In the Penal Colony," 1941) Ein Landarzt: Kleine Erzählungen, 1919 (The Country Doctor, 1945) Ein Hungerkünstler: Vier Geschichten, 1924 (A Hunger Artist, 1948) Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer: Ungedruckte Erzählungen und Prosa aus dem Nachlass, 1931 (The Great Wall of China, and Other Pieces, 1933) Erzählungen, 1946 (The Complete Stories, 1971) The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, 1948 Selected Short Stories, 1952 Nonfiction Brief an den Vater, wr. 1919, pb. 1952 (Letter to His Father, 1954) The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1948-1949 Tagebücher, 1910-1923, 1951 Briefe an Milena, 1952 (Letters to Milena, 1953) Briefe, 1902-1924, 1958 Briefe an Felice, 1967 (Letters to Felice, 1974) Briefe an Ottla und die Familie, 1974 (Letters to Ottla and the Family, 1982) Miscellaneous Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlass, 1953 (Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, 1954; also known as Wedding Preparations in the Country, and Other Posthumous Prose Writings, 1954) About the Author Bloom, Harold, ed. Franz Kafka. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005. Bridgwater, Patrick. Kafka's Novels: An Interpretation. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Corngold, Stanley. The Commentators' Despair: The Interpretation of Kafka's "Metamorphosis." Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1973. _______. Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. ______. Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988. Gilman, Sander L. Franz Kafka. London: Reaktion Books, 2005. Heller, Erich. Franz Kafka. New York: Viking Press, 1974. Marson, Eric. Kafka's "Trial": The Case Against Josef K. St. Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 1975. Rolleston, James. Kafka's Narrative Theater. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974. ______, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of "The Trial." Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976. Spann, Meno. Franz Kafka. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Decisive Years. Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2005. |
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