Many literary critics and scholars consider Franz Kafka to be a troubled man. His writing is drenched in depression, oppressions and violence. It creates a sense of helplessness and accepting the miseries of life, as fighting them is futile. However, it extremely difficult to label the novelist in absolute terms. Perhaps it is more accurate to consider Kafka a mystery instead of a sad hermit.
Kafka was not creating fiction to sell books. In fact he remained almost an unknown author during his lifetime. On his death bead he told his friend to destroy his stories as he did not want them to see the public’s eye. His friend not only saved the literature and notes but published them. This implies that his work was more of a catharsis to him.
Kafka did have a troubled childhood. He was a German Jew that suffered the Nazi persecution. His work reflects the anti-Semitic hate he endured. There seemed to be a hidden desire to die in some of the characters he created. Metamorphosis is one of his most famous and depressing art form. The protagonist, Gregor, turns into an oversized insect seems to be waiting to be dead. The vermin seems to represent the loneliness as he is unable to communicate (Gray 288). Even his family cuts ties with him as he becomes a burden on them (Gray 288). If he was using his characters to vent, it was more of a reflection of the circumstances he was forced to live under. Also, there is some controversy surrounding his story A Great Confusion. Max Brod translated and published the story in 1931 and he said to have mistranslated the title from ‘A Great Heroism’ to ‘A Great Confusion’ (Gray 8). This created a bias among the reader and his whole story now bears the undertone of sadness.
It is wrong to tag a novelist such as Kafka with a few dark labels. There is no doubt that there are certain recurring themes in his work but it would be inaccurate to assume that he was just that. He was probably reflecting the tragedies of his life than his sad perspective on the life itself. A photographer capturing the pictures of starving children in Africa cannot be called a sad person for depicting reality.
Work Cited
Gray, Richard T. A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005.
