Franz Kafka
(Prague, 1883-Kierling, Austria, 1924) Czech writer in the German language whose work marks the beginning of the profound renewal that the European novel would undergo in the first decades of the 20th century.Franz Kafka definitely left nineteenth-century realism behind by turning his narratives into parables of disturbing and inexhaustible symbolic richness: starring antiheroes lost in an incomprehensible world, his novels reflect an apparently recognizable and everyday reality, but subjected to disturbing mutations that immerse the reader in an oppressive and suffocating nightmare, the embodiment of the anguishes and uncertainties that plague contemporary man.
Franz Kafka
Biography
Born into a family of Jewish merchants, Franz Kafka was trained in a German cultural environment.His father, Hermann Kafka, had obtained a comfortable position with an advantageous marriage and was able to afford a good education for the first-born in one of the German schools in Prague.After graduating from high school (1901), the head of the family forced him to study law, a subject in which he never felt the least interest, and he obtained his doctorate in law in 1906.
The troubled and anguished existence of Kafka is reflected in the ironic pessimism that permeates his work, which he describes, in a style that ranges from the fantastic in his youthful works to the strictest realism, trajectories of which neither the beginning nor the end can be captured.Its characters, significantly designated with an initial (Joseph K.or simply K.), are shaken and threatened by hidden instances, materialized in the authoritarian bureaucratized and anonymous structures created by the same society.Thus, the protagonist of The Trial will not get to know the reason for his death sentence, and the surveyor of The Castle will search in vain for the face of the bureaucratic apparatus in which intends to integrate; both suffer from the anguished disorientation, the impotence and finally the feeling of guilt and helplessness in the face of an unintelligible and dehumanized world that escapes any attempt to control and that ends up degrading and submitting man.
So unique is the oppressive atmosphere that emanates from its most characteristic narratives that even the common language has incorporated the Kafkaesque adjective to refer to a particularly absurd and distressing situation.Fantastic or absurd elements, such as the transformation into a beetle of the traveling salesman Gregorio Samsa in The metamorphosis , show the alienation of the individual and introduce in the most everyday reality that distortion that allows to reveal his own and deeper inconsistency, a method that has come to be regarded as a special and literary reduction to the absurd.
Due to his transcendental influence, Franz Kafka is at the forefront of the renovation that the novelistic genre undertook in the first decades of the 20th century, in which great masters such as the French Marcel Proust must also be located, the Irish James Joyce and the American William Faulkner.But his irreducible originality and the immense literary value of his work have earned him a privileged, almost mythical position in contemporary literature a posteriori.One hundred years after The metamorphosis , the multiple interpretations drawn from the most varied points of view (from the existentialist approach to the sociological or psychoanalytic, passing through those that start from Judaism or the author's biography) continue looking like reductions or simplifications of a work that, due to its significant richness, is hardly comparable in world literature.
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