Franz Kafka: A man living behind the glass wall

Abstract

Franz Kafka born in 1883 in Prague. Prague was still part of Hapsburg Empire in Bohemia where numerous nationalities, languages and political and social orientations intermingled and co-existed.This place suffocated him. Practically unpublished and unknown during his lifetime, Kafka wrote in German, using same symbolism of unclear existence in an indifferent world that represents modern man’s dilemma. The reader experiences the helplessness of the flesh and the spirit rebelled against a hostile environment that are so pervasive through his writings that it came to be called “Kafkaesque”.According to M.H.Abraham’s major works of modernist fiction “subvert the basis conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up the narrative continuity, departing from the standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language by the use of stream of consciousness and other innovative modes of narration. Some of the important representative writers of modernism are the novelists Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Dorothy Richardson and William Faulkner. Poets W.B.Yeats, Wallace Stevens and the dramatists August Strindberg, Eugene O’Neil and many others.This paper tries to examine some interpretations on the works of Kafka.