Franz Kafka :: essays research papers fc

...Once more than the odious courtesies began, the first handed the knife across K. to the second, who handed it across K. back again to the first. K. now perceived clearly that he was hypothetical to seize the knife himself, as it traveled from hand to hand above him, and plunge it into his own breast. But he did non do so, he merely turned his head, which was still free to move, and gazed around him. He could not completely rise to the occasion, he could not relieve the officials of all their tasks the debt instrument for this last failure of his lay with him who had not left him the remnant of potential necessary for the deed....--from The TrialFranz Kafka, b. Prague, Bohemia (then belonging to Austria), July 3, 1883, d. June 3, 1924, has come to be one of the some influential writers of this century. Virtually unknown during his lifetime, the works of Kafka have since been recognized as symbolizing modern mans anxiety-ridden and grotesque alienation in an unintelligible, hostile, or absent-minded world. Kafka came from a middle-class Jewish family and grew up in the shadow of his unequivocal shopkeeper father, who impressed 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 go through a law degree in 1906. This allowed him to secure a alimentation that gave him time for writing, which he regarded as the essence--both blessing and curse--of his life. He soon prove a position in the semipublic Workers Accident Insurance institution, where he remained a loyal and successful employee until--beginning in 1917-- tuberculosis forced him to win repeated sick leaves and finally, in 1922, to retire. Kafka spent half his time later 1917 in sanatoriums and health resorts, his tuberculosis of the lungs finally spreading to the larynx.Kafka lived his life in emotional dependance on his par ents, whom he both loved and resented. none of his largely unhappy love affairs could wean him from this inner dependence though he longed to marry, he never did. devolve onually, he apparently oscillated between an ascetic aversion to intercourse, which he called "the punishment for being together," and an attraction to prostitutes. Sex in Kafkas writings is frequently connected with dirt or guiltiness and treated as an attractive abomination.