Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague, Bohemia, which is now Czechoslovakia, and he died of tuberculosis of the larynx in 1924. His career as a writer is well-known, but he was also an attorney, an intern in the law courts in Prague, a staff member of an insurance company in that city, and a specialist in accident prevention and work-place safety for Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, Prague. In his fiction, Kafka was able to evoke a sense of the bewildering oppressiveness of modern life:
His characters constantly face failure and futility, and they struggle to survive in a world that is largely unfeeling and unfamiliar. This world, rendered with great detachment and detail, is one in which the fantastic is entirely normal, the irrational is rational, and the unreasonable seems reasonable (Ryan 1562).
Many of Kafka's characters can be seen as versions of Kafka himself. The Joseph K. of The Trial is thought to be Kafka himself, and the way the character is suspected of a crime that is never identified but for which he feels guilt just the same is the way Kafka saw himself in this world:
[His] life was a continuing "trial" fraught with a deep and unnameable sense of guilt. It was a short life but an intense one, in which this man sought desperately and in vain, for happiness and, perhaps more than that, for peace of mind (Crawford 2).
The character of Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis is also a reflection of the real Kafka. Both the character and the author worked in a bureaucratic job where they felt they were only a small cog in a large and inhuman machine. The story uses a fantastic situation to create an allegory about the meaning of humanness and about the relationship of the individual to the world in which he lives. That relationship is involved here as the ties to that world are broken. Gregor Samsa awakens to find that he has been changed into a huge vermin. The only contact he ...