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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
dark
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Metamorphosis: unusual, excellent and thought provoking - 4
The Great Wall of China - 2.5
The Penal Settlement - 4
Investigations of a Dog - 3
The Giant Mole - 3
The Burrow - may read som day
The Great Wall of China - 2.5
The Penal Settlement - 4
Investigations of a Dog - 3
The Giant Mole - 3
The Burrow - may read som day
dark
funny
reflective
medium-paced
Some stories I liked more than others, often the case for short stories. I pulled synopses below to refresh my memory in the future. The Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony get 5 ⭐️ but everything else was considerably lower. Thought provoking, generally interesting themes for analysis, yet overall depressing and semi pointless.
The Judgment - A man writes to his friend who is living in Russia. He then speaks to his father, who questions whether the friend even exists. At the end of the story, the man's father condemns his son to death by drowning, and the son goes and throws himself into the river.
The Metamorphosis - The Metamorphosis plot focuses on Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman and dutiful son who single-handedly supports his parents and sister. One morning, following one of his infrequent overnight visits to his parents' home, Gregor is shocked to find that his body has been changed into an insect. In addition, the pitch of his voice has been altered to such an extent that humans can no longer understand his words. Gregor's family is horrified to discover the change in Gregor. Soon their shock gives way to disgust, but Gregor is mindful of their feelings and hides in the room when his sister brings his daily meals of Gregor, now unable to continue working to support them, discovers that his parents' claims of being too ill to work are false. Once Gregor becomes a problem rather than a provider, his family rejects him completely. His sister initially provides for his care and feeding, but she becomes indifferent to him, and he dies shortly after hearing his family's plans to abandon him. One of the themes of The Metamorphosis is alienation, a central theme in many works of modernist literature.
In the Penal Colony - The story focuses on the Traveler, who has just arrived in an island penal colony and is encountering its brutal execution machine for the first time. Everything about the functioning of the intricate machine and its purpose and history is told to him by the Officer. The machine carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner on his skin as he slowly dies over the course of twelve hours. The Officer begs the Traveler to speak to the current Commandant on behalf of the machine's continued use. The Traveler refuses to do so; he says he will not speak against the machine publicly and will instead give his opinion to the Commandant privately and then leave before he can be called to give an official account. Crestfallen that the Traveler has not been persuaded by his explanations and entreaty, the Officer frees the Condemned and sets up the machine for himself, with the words "Be Just" to be written on him. However, the machine malfunctions because of its advanced state of disrepair; instead of its usual elegant operation, it quickly stabs the Officer to death, denying him the mystical experience of the prisoners he had executed. “In the Penal Colony” explores what constitutes due and fair process in society. Kafka centers the plot on the planned execution of a prisoner who, instead of receiving a trial, has been sentenced to death by a high-ranking officer who automatically assumes that every man who is charged with a crime is guilty.
The Great Wall of China - Some sub-themes of the story include why the wall was built piecemeal (in small sections in many different places), the relationship of the Chinese with the past and the present and the emperor's imperceptible presence. The story is told in the first person by an older man from a southern province.
A Country Doctor - A country doctor makes an emergency visit to a sick patient on a winter night. The doctor faces absurd, surreal predicaments that pull him along and finally doom him.
A Common Confusion - The story details transactions between A and B. A meets B at H and comes home pleased with the events. Following this, he meets B again, but only after a delay to the very same H he arrived at successfully previously. B is not there. To add insult to injury, A learns B had arrived early waiting for him. Thankfully he has an opportunity to explain to B what happened, but in his haste he trips and falls. He hears B above him stomping down the stairs enraged. Like many of Kafka's characters the good intentions, hard work, and diligence are futile efforts in an indifferent world.
The New Advocate - A firm has hired a new associate, Bucephalos. The narrator realizes that times have changed, but hopes that people will hold back on any judgement and accept this new associate for who he is, and what he is capable of. One scholar has suggested that this story and Kafka's letters illustrate his distaste for the legal profession.
An Old Manuscript - The story begins as a shoemaker begins to open his shop at daybreak. He notices that a large group of nomads from the North have filled the town square. The nomads show no signs of culture, and soon transform the city into "a veritable sty". The Emperor appears at one of the palace windows and looks on as the nomads take control of the city, but he is unable to do anything. It addresses themes of bureaucracy and whether or not existing governments are truly for the people.
A Fratricide - One of Kafka's most realistically descriptive and graphically violent stories, and tells the story of a murderer, Schmar, and his victim, Wese. Although no clear motive for the murder is given anywhere in the story, it can be ascertained that the crime is a matter of jealous passion.
A Report to an Academy - The narrator, speaking before a scientific conference, describes his former life as an ape. His story begins in a West African jungle, in which a hunting expedition shoots and captures him. Caged on a ship for his voyage to Europe, he finds himself for the first time without the freedom to move as he will. Needing to escape from this situation, he studies the habits of the crew, and imitates them with surprising ease; he reports encountering particular difficulty only in learning to drink alcohol. Throughout the story, the narrator reiterates that he learned his human behavior not out of any desire to be human, but only to provide himself with a means of escape from his cage.
The Hunter Gracchus - dead Hunter Gracchus as it arrives at a port. The mayor of Riva meets Gracchus, who gives him an account of his death while hunting, and explains that he is destined to wander aimlessly and eternally over the seas. https://interestingliterature.com/2022/06/franz-kafka-hunter-gracchus-summary-analysis/amp/
A Hunger Artist - The protagonist, a hunger artist who experiences the decline in appreciation of his craft, is typically Kafkaesque: an individual marginalized and victimized by society at large. "A Hunger Artist" explores themes such as death, art, isolation, asceticism, spiritual poverty, futility, personal failure and the corruption of human relationships. Critic Maud Ellmann argues that it is not by food that we survive, but by the gaze of others.
Investigations of a Dog - The unnamed narrator, a dog, recounts a number of episodes from its past, in which it used quasi-scientific and rational methods to resolve basic questions of its existence that most of its peers were content to leave unanswered, such as: "Whence does the Earth procure its food?". Many of the seemingly absurd descriptions employed by the narrator express its misapprehension or confusion about the world, centering on dogkind's apparent inability to realize (or, some passages suggest, unwillingness to acknowledge) the existence of their human masters. Looking back on his investigations, the old dog (Kafka) admits he has always asked the most baffling questions rather than trying to adjust to the ways of his fellow dogs. The result is that his boundless thirst for knowledge has forced him out of his "social circle."
The Burrow - In the story a badger-like creature struggles to secure the labyrinthine burrow he has excavated as a home. The creature lives in constant fear of attack from enemies. This leads to compulsive attempts to make the burrow perfectly secure. Along with the Castle Keep, the entrance to the burrow is a source of constant anxiety. Later in the story the creature becomes obsessed by a persistent noise and resolves to dedicate his energy to the identification and elimination of its source.
Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk - Josephine is a rarity among the mouse people, for she has the innate ability to sing, which no others in the community have displayed in recent history. Although they are not a musical people and some question Josephine's ability, while others adore her and consider her a communal treasure, all of the mouse people gather round to listen whenever Josephine starts to sing and appreciate her performances as something that helps them tolerate their unusually hardworking lives. The narrator begins by asserting that whoever has not heard Josephine sing does not know the true power of music, but, upon reflection, he questions if Josephine even sings, or simply whistles, which all the mice people can do, and indeed do regularly. He says there is really nothing particularly noteworthy about her voice taken by itself, except perhaps its fragility, but that there must be something special about Josephine, since seeing her perform makes everyone forget, at least temporarily, any criticisms they may have about her; he wonders if her effect may come from making a spectacle of an everyday thing, in which case her average voice could be an asset. After some further refining of his estimation of Josephine and what she provides to the community, the narrator decides that what is held so dearly by the mouse people is not her 'ability', but the opportunity to gather and reflect in silence that her performances provide. They value these gatherings the most when times are the hardest, and Josephine remains influential in the community even though her performances sometimes attract the attention of the many enemies of the mouse people and lead to an attack from which she is always rushed to safety.
There are regular attempts made by Josephine to get the community of mouse people to allow her to stop her regular work so she can focus on her 'singing', though the narrator thinks what she is actually looking for is public recognition of the value of her art. She starts by arguing that she could sing even better if she had time to recuperate between performances, but the community ignores her pleas, so she begins to shorten her performances and feign injuries, but no one except for her supporters takes much notice. Eventually, Josephine disappears. She is initially missed and looked for, but the narrator comments that, in the end, she has only hurt herself by running away, since the mouse people were able to survive before she was alive and will now go on without her, at first with only their memories of her songs, and later without even those.
The Judgment - A man writes to his friend who is living in Russia. He then speaks to his father, who questions whether the friend even exists. At the end of the story, the man's father condemns his son to death by drowning, and the son goes and throws himself into the river.
The Metamorphosis - The Metamorphosis plot focuses on Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman and dutiful son who single-handedly supports his parents and sister. One morning, following one of his infrequent overnight visits to his parents' home, Gregor is shocked to find that his body has been changed into an insect. In addition, the pitch of his voice has been altered to such an extent that humans can no longer understand his words. Gregor's family is horrified to discover the change in Gregor. Soon their shock gives way to disgust, but Gregor is mindful of their feelings and hides in the room when his sister brings his daily meals of Gregor, now unable to continue working to support them, discovers that his parents' claims of being too ill to work are false. Once Gregor becomes a problem rather than a provider, his family rejects him completely. His sister initially provides for his care and feeding, but she becomes indifferent to him, and he dies shortly after hearing his family's plans to abandon him. One of the themes of The Metamorphosis is alienation, a central theme in many works of modernist literature.
In the Penal Colony - The story focuses on the Traveler, who has just arrived in an island penal colony and is encountering its brutal execution machine for the first time. Everything about the functioning of the intricate machine and its purpose and history is told to him by the Officer. The machine carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner on his skin as he slowly dies over the course of twelve hours. The Officer begs the Traveler to speak to the current Commandant on behalf of the machine's continued use. The Traveler refuses to do so; he says he will not speak against the machine publicly and will instead give his opinion to the Commandant privately and then leave before he can be called to give an official account. Crestfallen that the Traveler has not been persuaded by his explanations and entreaty, the Officer frees the Condemned and sets up the machine for himself, with the words "Be Just" to be written on him. However, the machine malfunctions because of its advanced state of disrepair; instead of its usual elegant operation, it quickly stabs the Officer to death, denying him the mystical experience of the prisoners he had executed. “In the Penal Colony” explores what constitutes due and fair process in society. Kafka centers the plot on the planned execution of a prisoner who, instead of receiving a trial, has been sentenced to death by a high-ranking officer who automatically assumes that every man who is charged with a crime is guilty.
The Great Wall of China - Some sub-themes of the story include why the wall was built piecemeal (in small sections in many different places), the relationship of the Chinese with the past and the present and the emperor's imperceptible presence. The story is told in the first person by an older man from a southern province.
A Country Doctor - A country doctor makes an emergency visit to a sick patient on a winter night. The doctor faces absurd, surreal predicaments that pull him along and finally doom him.
A Common Confusion - The story details transactions between A and B. A meets B at H and comes home pleased with the events. Following this, he meets B again, but only after a delay to the very same H he arrived at successfully previously. B is not there. To add insult to injury, A learns B had arrived early waiting for him. Thankfully he has an opportunity to explain to B what happened, but in his haste he trips and falls. He hears B above him stomping down the stairs enraged. Like many of Kafka's characters the good intentions, hard work, and diligence are futile efforts in an indifferent world.
The New Advocate - A firm has hired a new associate, Bucephalos. The narrator realizes that times have changed, but hopes that people will hold back on any judgement and accept this new associate for who he is, and what he is capable of. One scholar has suggested that this story and Kafka's letters illustrate his distaste for the legal profession.
An Old Manuscript - The story begins as a shoemaker begins to open his shop at daybreak. He notices that a large group of nomads from the North have filled the town square. The nomads show no signs of culture, and soon transform the city into "a veritable sty". The Emperor appears at one of the palace windows and looks on as the nomads take control of the city, but he is unable to do anything. It addresses themes of bureaucracy and whether or not existing governments are truly for the people.
A Fratricide - One of Kafka's most realistically descriptive and graphically violent stories, and tells the story of a murderer, Schmar, and his victim, Wese. Although no clear motive for the murder is given anywhere in the story, it can be ascertained that the crime is a matter of jealous passion.
A Report to an Academy - The narrator, speaking before a scientific conference, describes his former life as an ape. His story begins in a West African jungle, in which a hunting expedition shoots and captures him. Caged on a ship for his voyage to Europe, he finds himself for the first time without the freedom to move as he will. Needing to escape from this situation, he studies the habits of the crew, and imitates them with surprising ease; he reports encountering particular difficulty only in learning to drink alcohol. Throughout the story, the narrator reiterates that he learned his human behavior not out of any desire to be human, but only to provide himself with a means of escape from his cage.
The Hunter Gracchus - dead Hunter Gracchus as it arrives at a port. The mayor of Riva meets Gracchus, who gives him an account of his death while hunting, and explains that he is destined to wander aimlessly and eternally over the seas. https://interestingliterature.com/2022/06/franz-kafka-hunter-gracchus-summary-analysis/amp/
A Hunger Artist - The protagonist, a hunger artist who experiences the decline in appreciation of his craft, is typically Kafkaesque: an individual marginalized and victimized by society at large. "A Hunger Artist" explores themes such as death, art, isolation, asceticism, spiritual poverty, futility, personal failure and the corruption of human relationships. Critic Maud Ellmann argues that it is not by food that we survive, but by the gaze of others.
Investigations of a Dog - The unnamed narrator, a dog, recounts a number of episodes from its past, in which it used quasi-scientific and rational methods to resolve basic questions of its existence that most of its peers were content to leave unanswered, such as: "Whence does the Earth procure its food?". Many of the seemingly absurd descriptions employed by the narrator express its misapprehension or confusion about the world, centering on dogkind's apparent inability to realize (or, some passages suggest, unwillingness to acknowledge) the existence of their human masters. Looking back on his investigations, the old dog (Kafka) admits he has always asked the most baffling questions rather than trying to adjust to the ways of his fellow dogs. The result is that his boundless thirst for knowledge has forced him out of his "social circle."
The Burrow - In the story a badger-like creature struggles to secure the labyrinthine burrow he has excavated as a home. The creature lives in constant fear of attack from enemies. This leads to compulsive attempts to make the burrow perfectly secure. Along with the Castle Keep, the entrance to the burrow is a source of constant anxiety. Later in the story the creature becomes obsessed by a persistent noise and resolves to dedicate his energy to the identification and elimination of its source.
Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk - Josephine is a rarity among the mouse people, for she has the innate ability to sing, which no others in the community have displayed in recent history. Although they are not a musical people and some question Josephine's ability, while others adore her and consider her a communal treasure, all of the mouse people gather round to listen whenever Josephine starts to sing and appreciate her performances as something that helps them tolerate their unusually hardworking lives. The narrator begins by asserting that whoever has not heard Josephine sing does not know the true power of music, but, upon reflection, he questions if Josephine even sings, or simply whistles, which all the mice people can do, and indeed do regularly. He says there is really nothing particularly noteworthy about her voice taken by itself, except perhaps its fragility, but that there must be something special about Josephine, since seeing her perform makes everyone forget, at least temporarily, any criticisms they may have about her; he wonders if her effect may come from making a spectacle of an everyday thing, in which case her average voice could be an asset. After some further refining of his estimation of Josephine and what she provides to the community, the narrator decides that what is held so dearly by the mouse people is not her 'ability', but the opportunity to gather and reflect in silence that her performances provide. They value these gatherings the most when times are the hardest, and Josephine remains influential in the community even though her performances sometimes attract the attention of the many enemies of the mouse people and lead to an attack from which she is always rushed to safety.
There are regular attempts made by Josephine to get the community of mouse people to allow her to stop her regular work so she can focus on her 'singing', though the narrator thinks what she is actually looking for is public recognition of the value of her art. She starts by arguing that she could sing even better if she had time to recuperate between performances, but the community ignores her pleas, so she begins to shorten her performances and feign injuries, but no one except for her supporters takes much notice. Eventually, Josephine disappears. She is initially missed and looked for, but the narrator comments that, in the end, she has only hurt herself by running away, since the mouse people were able to survive before she was alive and will now go on without her, at first with only their memories of her songs, and later without even those.
dark
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
It was just so boring and unnecessarily pretentious. I understand why they’re so well loved and referenced, but his writing is clearly not for me.
This collection was my first introduction to Kafka, and I love it. "The Metamorphosis" is fantastic, of course, but I think "In The Penal Colony" is also a great story.
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
a couple of the stories stuck with me, notably metamorphosis (obviously), and the judgement, however, the short musings/poems near the beginning of the book were the most beautiful to me. the stories near the end weren't holding my attention
This is the type of classic literature I love. Really great stories that are imaginative yet harrowing and leave you deep in thought, all while still remaining relevant in its themes. This is a great collection that still holds up even today.