Franz Kafka Research Paper

Franz Kafka was one of the most influential writers of the early twentieth century, skillfully depicting people’s feeling of anxiety-ridden alienation in an incomprehensible and indifferent world in his poems and short stories. His writing was unique from the writing of any other author before him, and soon required the creation of a new adjective, Kafkaesque, to adequately and briefly describe it. Kafka’s works are unique from earlier literature because of his technical writing style. The technical writing style refers to the literary devices used in the work, such as metaphors, stream of consciousness narrative, and ambiguity. It is difficult for writers to recapture the Kafkaesque feeling of alienation felt when reading in The Metamorphosis,
One of the most significant metaphors in Kafka on the Shore is the simile, “Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions…There’s no sun, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bone.”1 This simile sets the preface for and ambiguous journey with twists of fate laced with fear-provoking threat of something powerful and uncontrollable “…[Cutting] through flesh like a thousand razor blades.”2 This simile is very similar to one used in Kafka’s poem The Trees, which begins with “For we are like the trunks of tree in the snow,” then gives an explanation of how the tree trunks seem movable in the snow but are not because the roots under the snow holds the tree in place, but then ends with, “But see, that too, is only apparent.”3 The reference to nature and the allusion to white particles–either swirling sand or snow on the ground–obstructing the perception of reality is too strikingly similar to go
In chapter eleven, the boy wakes up in Sakura’s house and immediately begins and endless flow of thoughts. He writes a memo to Sakura to thank her for helping him and allowing him to stay the night, but he is easily distracted from the task at hand. “Someone in the neighborhood’s got their TV on at full volume...The people on the show all yelling at each other, and the commercials just as loud and obnoxious.”4 Likewise, Kafka shows readers the thoughts of Gregor in The Transformation, for readers to gain sympathy for him, and also to see life from his perspective. Even when Gregor sees that he has been transformed into a monstrous insect, some of his first thoughts are about the dreary weather outside, and then about the adversities of his job as a traveling salesman. “...I’m saddled with the strain of all this traveling, the anxiety about train connections, the bad irregular meals...The devil take it all!”5 Even after months of being a bug, Gregor’s human thoughts easily distract him from what he is doing. “The family was completely absorbed by the violin-playing; the lodgers, however...soon withdrew to the window, muttering amongst