Franz Kafka :: essays research papers fc

...Once more the odious courtesies began, the eldest handed the natural language across K. to the second, who handed it across K. back once more to the first. K. now perceived clearly that he was supposed to seize the knife himself, as it traveled from hand to hand above him, and plunge it into his birth breast. But he did not do so, he merely move his head, which was still free to move, and gazed around him. He could not completely rear to the occasion, he could not relieve the officials of all their tasks the responsibility for this last chastening of his lay with him who had not left him the remnant of strength necessary for the deed....--from The mental testFranz Kafka, b. Prague, Bohemia (then belonging to Austria), July 3, 1883, d. June 3, 1924, has come to be one of the most influential writers of this century. about unknown during his lifetime, the works of Kafka have since been recognized as symbolizing neo mans anxiety-ridden and grotesque alienation in an unintel ligible, hostile, or indifferent world. Kafka came from a conservative Jewish family and grew up in the shadow of his domineering shopkeeper father, who move Kafka as an awesome patriarch. The feeling of impotence, even in his rebellion, was a syndrome that became a pervasive theme in his fiction. Kafka did well in the prestigious German high school in Prague and went on to receive a righteousness degree in 1906. This allowed him to secure a livelihood that gave him time for writing, which he regarded as the essence--both blessing and curse--of his life. He soon found a plant in the semipublic Workers Accident Insurance institution, where he remained a firm and successful employee until--beginning in 1917-- tuberculosis forced him to take repeated draw leaves and finally, in 1922, to retire. Kafka spent half his time after 1917 in sanatoriums and health resorts, his tuberculosis of the lungs finally spreading to the larynx.Kafka lived his life in emotional habituation on his parents, whom he both loved and resented. None of his largely in a bad way(p) love affairs could wean him from this inner dependence though he longed to marry, he never did. Sexually, he apparently oscillated between an ascetic distaste to intercourse, which he called "the punishment for being together," and an attraction to prostitutes. Sex in Kafkas literature is frequently connected with dirt or guilt and treated as an attractive abomination.