Themes in Franz Kafka's Work

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 charac

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is might be a dream without really being certain. Kafka displaces his attention from his own plight to his fiction, and here he is able to explore the themes that concern him in his life through the created world of his characters and through the fantastic situations in which they may find themselves, dreams come to life. Gregor has gone from being human to being non-human. Gregor does not rail against his fate but rather seems to accept it as his due, perhaps also accepting the idea that punishment is his due simply because he was a human being. The matter-of-fact opening of the story is carried through in Gregor's acceptance of his change: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect" (Kafka 643). Aside form the change itself, the most disturbing thing in this statement is the reference to "uneasy dreams," mirroring what Lucas says about the story itself as a dream. The regularity of Gregor's life to this moment is indicated by his thoughts concerning how he must be out of bed at a certain time in order to get to work as he has done every day of his life. As he lays in bed now, Gregor seems to sense a change not only in himself but in the way time p

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