Summary Kafka’s stories often deal with the power that either drives man beyond himself into the spiritual sphere or pulls him back* into a primitive, this-worldly realm. (Compare the “assault from above” and the “assault from below” in “A Hunger Artist.”) In several of his stories, he uses the symbol […]
Read more Summary and Analysis The Hunter Gracchus” (Der Jager Gracchus)”Summary and Analysis In The Penal Colony” (In Der Strafkolonie)”
Summary Schopenhauer and Dostoevsky are the two most likely spiritual mentors of this story. In his Parerga und Paralipomena, Schopenhauer suggested that it might be helpful to look at the world as a penal colony, and Dostoevsky, whom Kafka re-read in 1914, supplied Kafka with many punishment fantasies. It was […]
Read more Summary and Analysis In The Penal Colony” (In Der Strafkolonie)”Summary and Analysis A Country Doctor” (Ein Landarzt)”
Summary Kafka used an unusual technique for telling his story of “A Country Doctor”: he wrote in the first person, thereby imparting an exciting degree of immediacy to the story. The story is also exciting because of its fragmentary character — a symptom of Kafka’s searching mind, reflected here in […]
Read more Summary and Analysis A Country Doctor” (Ein Landarzt)”Summary and Analysis A Hunger Artist” (Ein Hungerkunstler)”
Summary The first sentence of this story seems to leave no doubt about the story’s realistic content: “During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished.” First Off, then, Kafka induces a consciousness of time by tempting the reader to inquire into the situation of hunger artists […]
Read more Summary and Analysis A Hunger Artist” (Ein Hungerkunstler)”Summary and Analysis The Judgment” (Das Urteil)”
Summary There are two reasons why “The judgment” is considered the most autobiographical of Kafka’s stories. First, there are Kafka’s own commentaries and entries in his diary. When he re-read the story, for instance, he noted that only he could penetrate to the core of the story which, much like […]
Read more Summary and Analysis The Judgment” (Das Urteil)”Summary and Analysis The Metamorphosis” (Die Verwandlung)”
Summary Kafka wrote “The Metamorphosis” at the end of 1912, soon after he finished “The judgment,” and it is worth noting that the two stories have much in common: a businessman and bachelor like Georg Bendemann of “The judgment,” Gregor Samsa is confronted with an absurd fate in the form […]
Read more Summary and Analysis The Metamorphosis” (Die Verwandlung)”Franz Kafka Biography
Born in Prague in 1883, Franz Kafka is today considered the most important prose writer of the so-called Prague Circle, a loosely knit group of German-Jewish writers who contributed to the culturally fertile soil of Prague during the 1880s until after World War I. Yet from the Czech point of […]
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