franz kafka metamorphosis and other stories

For the critic arguing this way, the question is not what Kafka really says but the reasons why he supposedly said it. There is the sociological interpretation, according to which Kafka's work is but a mirror of the historical-sociological situation in which he lived. Freud himself often pointed out that the analysis of artistic values is not within the scope of the analytical methods he taught.

As soon as this becomes more than one among many aids to understanding, however, one is likely to read not Kafka, but a text on applied psychoanalysis or Freudian symbology. One may therefore read Kafka with Freud's teachings in mind. We know Kafka was familiar with the teachings of Sigmund Freud (he says so explicitly in his diary, after he finished writing 'The judgment' in 1912) and that he tried to express his problems through symbols in the Freudian sense. The psychological or psychoanalytical approach to Kafka largely ignores the content of his works and uses the 'findings' of the diagnosis as the master key to puzzling out Kafka's world. Kafka's disenchantment with and eventual hatred of his father were a stimulus to write, but they neither explain the fascination of his writing nor tell us why he wrote at all. In it, I merely poured out the sorrow I could not sigh out at your breast', it is nevertheless dangerous to regard the anxieties permeating his work solely in these terms. While it is probably true that few writers have ever been moved to exclaim, 'My writing was about you. This interpretation claims that Kafka's works are little more than reflections of his lifelong tension between bachelorhood and marriage or, on another level, between his skepticism and his religious nature. Among the many approaches one encounters is that of the autobiographical approach. A major problem confronting readers of Kafka's short stories is to find a way through the increasingly dense thicket of interpretations.

Franz kafka metamorphosis and other stories