Franz Kafka

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Frank Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924) was an German author and attorney who wrote several classic stories illustrating how humans are alienated from a hostile, unintelligible, and indifferent modern world. Most of his stories involve the protagonists being caught in a nightmarish situation that they can not hope to resolve or escape from.[1]

A friend ignored Kafka's request to burn his writings with his death, and instead had them published. Several of his works became classics after Kafka died, including The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926). In The Trial, an innocent man finds himself a defendant in a trial that he cannot understand, and he is sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t do. Kafka’s most famous short story was "The Metamorphosis" (1915), in which the narrator (Gregor Samsa) awakens to realize that he has been transformed into a monstrous vermin (often interpreted to be an insect). Through the course of the story, Gregor suffers an injury that ultimately becomes fatal.

Throughout Kafka’s works he expressed and sympathized with the feeling of being an outsider. Kafka didn't place much emphasis on formal religion, though never rebuked entirely his Jewish heritage. Indeed, many of the ethical dilemmas found in his works reflect his intellectual fondness for rabbinical rhetoric. Franz Kafka passed away at age 40 due to complications surrounding the onset of tuberculosis. His body lies in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague-Žižkov.

See also

References

  1. The New American Desk Encyclopedia, Penguin Group, 1989
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