Modernist literature is often concerned with modernity as a kind of living death, but perhaps no twentieth-century writer offered a more explicit parable of this fact than Franz Kafka in ‘The Hunter Gracchus’. This story, which exists as a brief six-page tale and an even shorter fragment, was among the […]
Tag: Franz Kafka
A Summary and Analysis of Franz Kafka’s ‘The Village Schoolmaster’
‘The Village Schoolmaster’ is an unfinished short story by Franz Kafka (1883-1924), begun in 1914-15 before being abandoned by Kafka. The story is about interpretation versus reality, and how our understanding of the world is often determined by our motivations and outlook.
A Summary and Analysis of Franz Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’
‘A Report to an Academy’ is a short story by Franz Kafka (1883-1924), written in March and April 1917. The story takes the form of a speech delivered by a former ape who has learned to mimic human actions and speech, and who is reporting his life and experiences to […]
A Summary and Analysis of Franz Kafka’s ‘An Imperial Message’
‘An Imperial Message’ is a short text by Franz Kafka (1883-1924), written in 1919. Too brief to be considered a ‘short story’ in the traditional sense, ‘An Imperial Message’ is usually classified as a parable. The text describes a dying emperor who dispatches a messenger with a message for us, […]
A Summary and Analysis of Franz Kafka’s The Castle
Although we know Franz Kafka’s novel under the English title The Castle, it’s worth pointing out that we might also make a case for calling it ‘The Lock’: Schloss, in the novel’s original German title, means both ‘castle’ and ‘lock’. Kafka’s The Castle is about both a castle and about […]