Franz Kafka: 3 Famous Short Stories With Deep Meanings Explained
The 20th century acclaimed author of absurd stories hid many discomforting truths about the human condition…
“A fine wound is all I brought into the world” — From A Country’s Doctor
Franz Kafka is called many things.
The Atlantic described him as ‘cripplingly indecisive, terrified by life, obsessed with death.’
Elsewhere, he is referred to as ‘a deeply tormented soul, a lover of torture, a sadomasochist, devilishly disoriented, nightmarishly bleak, excruciatingly hopeless, pathetically dark…’
While he might be all of those things, he was also this one thing. And that is a brilliant writer who understood the complexities of the human psyche.
In his literary works which comprised of three unfinished novels which he never intended to publish and a couple of dozen short stories, he attempted to fuse the elements of the real and fantastic to create bizarre or surrealistic situations for his characters. Those situations have often been described as seriously horrific and stupidly comedic at the same time. So much so to the point that they have been accused to belong in the realm of the Absurd.
You might have heard the word absurd before. Perhaps in comedy or painting. The famous Monty Python comedy TV show is thought to be absurd in many senses, and even though it refers more to the narrative style of the show, the word has a little different meaning in Kafka’s case.
Albert Camus, the famous absurdist philosopher once made a tribute to Kafka in his 1942 mind-boggling essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he claimed that Franz Kafka was absurd.
But what does that mean?
Technically speaking, the absurd is a state of conflict between our capacity to find a pattern, purpose or meaning in the world and our inability to find any in a patternless, purposeless, or meaningless world.
In other words, it is a state of paradox, in fact, for Camus one of the most fundamental paradoxes of human existence where one part of the human conscious want to find meaning in their lives, and the other part simply can’t find any no matter how hard it tries.
And this takes us to the vision of Kafka.
Kafka wanted to articulate what happens when we find ourselves in a world that does not make any sense especially when we are hard-wired on a very basic level to make sense of the world around us. This enduring conflict between our desire to make sense and our constant failure to make any has been a source of life-long reflection and misery for Kafka’s 40 years on the planet.
Another thing that also kept Kafka awake in his nights of anxiety was the conflict between our natural tendencies and the modern artificial settings in which we tended to live.
For Kafka, this conflict produced constant human worry and frustration as we always struggle to keep in control their natural instincts and balance their raw and civilized selves. Our natural instincts are constantly kept in check by society in the form of restrictions — rules, laws, and norms that diverge our two selves from ever meeting.
The more extraordinary the character’s adventures are, the more noticeable will be the naturalness of the story: it is in proportion to the divergence we feel between the strangeness of a man’s life and the simplicity with which that man accepts it. It seems that this naturalness is Kafka’s — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus 1942
But that’s not all.
If there is one word that captures everything about his legacy, it is that Kafka was a writer of contradictions.
A buzzing, confusing, fragmentary, giant world of contradictions.
A penner of paradoxes.
What is a paradox? Well to put it literally, a paradox is a contradictory statement or proposition that is nonetheless true.
Jason Reza once said that Kafka was ‘a denizen of the twilight.’ Note that it does not mean that Kafka’s world is dark, it means that it is in the contradictory realm of time when it’s neither light or dark, or it is both light and dark at the same time, a supposed contradiction — a kind of paradox.
A lot of people find Kafka hard to read because they look at Kafka’s world from the wrong lens. That is, they look at it from the lens of classic ancient and modern literature which often does not do justice to Kafka.
To understand this point, consider the following.
In the world of classic ancient literature, take the Odyssey, for example, the hero Odysseus already knows his purpose in life. He does not have to go out and ‘search’ for his purpose. All he has to do is make his life conform to the purpose that the Greek gods had given him from the start, that’s the conflict or the so-called contradiction that he has to overcome. That is how the trope of the classic ancient goes.
Now consider the world of classic modern literature. In that world, the protagonist does not know their purpose. They have to ‘search for it.’ These kind of stories are called, Bildungsroman or ‘coming of age’ stories. There are contradictions in a coming of age story, for instance between the protagonist wants and desires and their circumstances. But those contradictions get resolved in the end when the protagonist ‘finds themselves’. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for example, the protagonist Pierre Bezokhov lives with the contradiction between his principles and his actions. But by the end of the novel, Pierre goes through a transformation, he becomes a ‘new’ man, his perpetual contradiction which followed him throughout the book is resolved.
Similarly, take Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in which the protagonist Raskolnikov lives with the contradiction between his morality and his rationality. At the end of the book, however, Raskolnikov goes through a transformation. He realizes his moral mistakes and decides to seek the path of forgiveness. Again, in Dostoevsky’s novel, the contradiction that followed Raskolnikov throughout the book is finally resolved.
But take Kafka. Take his most famous novella, The Metamorphosis which is supposed to be about transformation. Right?
But that’s the point. The Metamorphosis is supposed to be about metamorphosis. The first line of the novella states that “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
The protagonist, Gregor Samsa is supposed to transform when he becomes a giant insect. But he does not get transformed. He is still stuck in his past life, he still has the same worries and anxieties even after he becomes an insect. For instance, he lived a life of loneliness when he was a salesman of a shitty company, and after he becomes a gigantic insect, guess what, he still lives a life of loneliness because now he is confined to his room all the time.
He is literally transformed but he is still not transformed.
And that’s the whole deal with Kafka’s stories. In Kafka’s stories, the contradiction of the protagonist never gets resolved no matter what. The contradictory state is the ultimate state of man. Change happens but still, no change happens. Transformation happens but still, no transformation happens. The protagonist simply can’t escape their contradictions. They are perpetually stuck with it forever and ever…
In coming of age stories, the transformation happens at the end, in Kafka’s story, it happened at the beginning, in fact, at the very beginning, and even despite that climactic event, the protagonist is still where he was before.
In Kafka’s stories, the contradiction of the protagonist never gets resolved no matter what.
And that is why it looks absurd. It looks very absurd.
If Kafka wrote like modern fiction writers, in his novel, Gregor Samsa after becoming an insect would have flown off the window and escaped his predicament, the contradiction of his life that is causing him misery. And that would have made much more sense. But that does not happen. Gregor Samsa can’t escape his contradiction. It is very much a part of him.
That is the lens we need to understand the works of Kafka.
Now there are three short stories that nicely illuminate Kafka’s world and in many ways, make the potency of his genius appreciable for everyone.
1) A Report to An Academy
This is probably Kafka’s one of the most fascinating short story as it is full of complex themes and deep philosophical meanings.
But first, a short summary:
Written in 1917, A Report to An Academy is a story about an ape called Red Peter. The story begins with Red Peter presenting to a scientific academy how he learned to transform himself from an ape to a human.
Red Peter recalls the time when he used to live in West African jungles. One day, he was captured by European hunters who sent him on a ship to Atlantic. Finding himself unable to move or roam freely as he used to in his jungle life, Red Peter decides to free himself by imitating humans. He learns to act like humans, learns to walk and talk like them, and behave like them, to the point that he becomes a human. In a sense that everyone begins to recognize him as a human even though he is still physically an ape. And that’s how he made his journey from being an ape to a human who is just ‘aping’ humans. Red Peter also says that he has become so much of a human now that he does not even remember his past ape life.
That was the whole story in a nutshell.
Now the very first thing that we have to note is that Red Peter is still an ape, he is a ‘fake human’ in a sense that he is only human because he is imitating, he is actually not a human. And since he now does not remember or connect with his past ape life, he is not fully an ape either. He is stuck in a categorical realm where he is neither a human nor an ape. He does not belong fully either to the human species or the ape species. That is a state of grave contradiction.
He is neither of this world nor of that world. He will never reach a point where he ‘fully’ becomes human because he is physically an ape, nor he is ‘fully’ an ape because he does not act like apes, he acts like humans. Red Peter lives in this state of contradiction, and this contradiction can never be resolved. It is fundamental to Red Peter whose ‘identity’ is permanently fragmented.
If you further think about it, this state of fragmented identity is often associated with the state of refugees. Take Kafka’s own example. Kafka was a German-speaking Czech. He was not a German, nor he was a Czechian. The people of Czech made fun of him because they thought that he was a German, and German people who lived in Czech did not consider him as their own because they thought that he was a Czechian.
And that contradiction is the fundamental identity of a refugee’s state. A refugee leaves his home country where he does not fully belong and goes to a new place where he also does not fully belong. That is a fracture in their identity that can never be resolved. It can never be overcome. It is a part of them.
‘I ain’t in heaven, and I ain’t in oith, but taking the woist from both worlds’ — hairy ape, Eugene O Neill
Now, of course, the story has other meanings as well that go even deeper.
In his play Kafka’s Ape, Phala O. Phala depicts a black man to play the role of the ape. This clearly points to a deeper historical and political connotations of the story. Some say that it has references to the Trans Atlantic slave trade and the deep psyche of race in Western thought which sees the other man as the primitive man.
For Miyambo, the story speaks about the South-African apartheid and identity crises that resulted after the war. He described his analysis of the play in an interview saying that:
“This ape speaks about xenophobia, about homophobia, how one is uncomfortable in their own skin. He is a performing ape, but he is not performing because he wants to, he speaks about this as a way out. He wonders what true freedom is, we are all fighting for our freedom….There is only one other black man who has played this role, Sello Maake ka-Ncube. It is an uncomfortable thought for many people — a black man playing an ape. But this is about just that — the play is an allegorical observation of South African society through the eyes of others. Kafka’s Ape presents a conflicting point of view in which traditional boundaries, categories and norms are questioned, in which beauty, harmony and symmetry are usurped by cruelty, dissonance and abnormality. It highlights the complexities of identity in post-apartheid South Africa and the human race in general.”
Others believe that the story has a prophetic message about the Jewish diaspora who did not belong in Germany and did not belong anywhere else they went.
This bears an eerie resemblance to Hannah Arendt’s 1943 essay We Refugees in which she captured what it means to be a refugee. Hannah Arendt, a Holocaust survivor and an excellent political commentator described the condition of the refugee — ‘the endless anxiety, ravaging despair, deluded optimism, jolting absurdity, and even the “humour” of the refugee.’ All the things that are found in the spirit of the Kafka’s world.
But that’s not all.
Remember as mentioned earlier, Kafka was also concerned about the inherent conflict between human’s natural tendencies and the artificial modern setting in which they often live. Well, this story also highlights that spirit.
The never-ending contradiction between our natural self and out civilized self and our attempts to constantly balance them has been a source of anxiety and worry in the Kafka’s world.
Note how even this story is about transformation which happened at the beginning because Red Peter who is narrating is already a human in the first scene by the time he reports to the academy. But note again, how this is also an incomplete transformation. Meaning that the civilized self is not fully civilized, it has remnants of the natural self that will never go away. And the natural self can never be purely natural because it has now been corrupted by the civilized self forever which again is an enduring contradiction that can never be resolved, a state of twilight that has no end.
To summarize, this story, The Report to An Academy just like the novella Metamorphosis points to a categorical realm where one is incomplete, a phase of transformation that hasn’t and will never reach it’s full, it is perpetually stuck somewhere in the middle such that ‘that state’ is now one’s ultimate reality.
2) The Penal Colony
Ok. This story is a little different than the previous. And it has some similarities with The Trial, another of Kafka’s most widely known and applauded works.
But first, a short summary:
In this story, a man named the Traveller visits a place called the Penal Colony at the invitation of the New Commandment, the new head of the Penal Colony. There, the Traveller is greeted by the Officer — a man in charge of the machine knows as the Apprautus.
The Officer gives the Traveller a presentation of sorts about how the Appratus works. The Officer enthusiastically explains the appratus as a machine which is used to torture and kill the Condemned Man who is a person charged with a crime under the Penal Colony. The Officer describes the machine as having three parts — the Bed where the Condemned Man lies down, the Inscriber which has the law the Condemned Man broke loaded on it, and the Harrow, which consists of needles that inscribe the crime that the Condemned Man committed on the man’s body. The Officer further explains that for the first six hours, the person in the machine feels only pain, but after the sixth hour they begin to think about what’s written on their body, they begin to wonder which law they have broken, and they ultimately reach a state of transcendence. By the twelveth hour, they die and their body is dropped into a pit beside the appratus.
The Officer also explains to the Traveller that the criminal sentences are given without the accused having a defence, the assumption always being that they are guilty. For instance, a Condemned Man who was required to salute the Captain every hour once fell asleep and was reported to the Appratus where the Officer judged him guilty. The Officer says that it saves everyone’s time that there is no trial or court because the Condemned Man is going to lie anyway.
The Traveller is appalled by this method of Appratus justice. The Officer tells the Traveller that he is the last standing individual who supports the apparatus method of justice. The New Commandment has replaced the old method and he is abolishing the Penal Colony. The Officer asks the Traveller to defend the appratus method of justice in front of the New Commandement. Finally, The Officer decides to go in the Appratus machine but the machine breaks down and the Officer gets killed.
Next the Traveller visits the hidden gravesite of the Old Commandment, the old head of the Penal Colony who came up with appratus method of justice, whose dead body now rests in a coffee house. Then the Traveller prepares to leave the colony where two other men, the Condmened Man and a Soldier try to flee with the Traveller as well, but the Traveller abandons them on the shore and leaves.
Now there is a lot to unpack here.
The first thing that we should notice is how in this story, the Condemned Man who is accused of a crime in the Penal Colony does not know what crime he has committed. This is a pattern in Kafka’s world that was also a key feature in his novel, The Trial where the protagonist Joseph K did not know the crime he was charged with. But what does this mean?
There are two interpretations of this.
According to the first interpretation, the government, laws and rules in Kafka’s world actually represent the part of the human psyche that is tamed, civilized and moral whereas the Condemned Man or Joseph K represents the other part of the human psyche, it is raw, untamed and natural. Then, the whole story is a story of the self which is trapped in a constant state of guilt — specifically the kind of misplaced guilt because the self does not know the reason behind their guilt. In this interpretation, the symbol of not knowing what crime you have committed represents the internal state of a person torn by unbeknownst guilt. This way of seeing makes a lot of sense. Because a) Kafka often wrote about his experiences with guilt — his troubled relationship with his father, his sexual promiscuity, his failed engagement with the love of his life. And b) Kafka was heavily influenced by Fydor Doestevesky who dealt with the primary question of guilt in his magnum opus, Crime and Punishment.
According to the second interpretation, however, Kafka’s world of government, laws and rules represents nothing less than a totalitarian dream. Kafka once wrote that “it is extremely painful thing to be ruled by laws that one does not know.”
It is in this spirit that Hannah Arendt called The Trial, “a premonition of the totalitarian regimes to come.”
The concept of Kafka’s Trial which is also often called Kafkaesque has been invoked in many real-world scenarios. From military courts and anti-terrorism laws to new technology and social media that puts our privacy in jeopardy.
In 2013, the U.S Attorney General John Whitehead once said about The Trial:
We now live in a society in which a person can be accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving band of Swat police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with no recourse to discover why he was targeted. Indeed, this is Kafka’s nightmare and it is slowly becoming America’s reality…
The next thing that is important to note in The Penal Colony is the way the Officer describes the Apparatus — describing the shape and speed of the apparatus, pinpointing every little detail about the machine, it’s layout, make and efficiency in a cold calculating way, totally diverged from the reality that the end result of the machine was torturing and killing of a living person. If you think about it, that is how the weaponry and equipment of modern warfare is often described in the lingo of the military, for instance, the sheer obsession with the make and performance of a fighter jet or an M-Sniper divested from the realization that at the very end a living human being is going to die from it.
And finally, the most mind-bending theme of The Penal Colony is the moral relativism that plays out between the Traveller and the Officer’s method of justice. Note that the Traveller is from a land where the Apparatus method is the thing of the past. And the Traveller faces a grave contradiction — between being a mere observer and being morally disturbed by the justice system of The Penal Colony. The Traveller faces liberal guilt of sorts, just like the Western eye does when looking at let’s say honour culture of tribal societies. Note how in the end, the Traveller abandons the two men who are trying to escape the revolting system of apparatus, well let’s just say the Traveller does not have a ‘saviour complex’ but his actions at the end are jerklike at best. This also presents another contradiction, another paradox, for the outsider’s eye, when they try to intervene they are bad when they don’t intervene, they are…bad still.
You are a foreigner, mind your own business. He could make no answer to that unless he were to add that he was amazed at himself in this connection, for he travelled only as an observer, with no intention at all of altering other people’s method of administering justice — The Penal Colony
3) A Country’s Doctor
This is the kind of story that truly belongs in the realm of the Absurd. Even literally, as this short story was once used by scientists studying the brain of subjects in an fMRI to see what happens when people read nonsensical stories.
This story is the densest of all as it primarily about the self and the inherent contradictions dividing the self. The fact that it’s written in the first person might say a lot about how this story represents Kafka himself.
But first, a short summary:
So the story begins with a doctor who has been called to attend a sick young boy. The doctor finds out that he can’t reach the boy because his horse has died. He and his maid, Rosa search for a horse, but to no avail. Then suddenly, a groom appears and offers the doctor his set of magnificent horses. The groom then grabs and rapes the doctor’s maid, Rosa.
But the doctor has to leave. He reaches the house of a sick young boy where the boy tells him that the doctor should let him die. The doctor thinks that the young boy is perfectly healthy, but later he sees the fine wound which the boy claims is ‘all I brought in the world.’ The doctor tells the patient that he can’t save him. And at the end leaves the young man’s house. By the time he leaves, his horses have ran free and thinking about his maid Rosa, he begins to walk towards his own home in cold night.
“A false ring of the night bell, once answered — it can never be made right. — Last line, A Country’s Doctor”
The story is actually about the country’s doctor who is hallucinating/dreaming about the bell ring that he got from the young sick man’s house. His visit to the patient seems to be a visit to the bewildering depths of his own personality. The weird patient does not exist outside the doctor’s imagination, he represents the dark part of the doctor’s own psyche.
‘A fine wound is all I brought into this world’ is the doctor saying it to himself. What Kafka has done in this story is described the condition of a man who wants to help himself but cannot.
The situation of the country’s doctor can also be thought in terms of the situation of a writer. A writer wants to help the world around him through his words by fighting ignorance, superstition and dogma but they struggle all the time knowing deep down that no matter how hard they try, they can’t save the world.
“That’s how the people act in my district; they always expect the impossible from the doctor,” he says
There is a gleaming paradox even in this story. The doctor whose maid is named Rosa is named for a reason. Rosa means open wound. Even though the doctor and the sick young man are world’s apart, or they are perhaps a reflection of old and young Kafka himself, the two are not that different from each other. There is not much difference between the doctor and the young sick man. Both of them are wounded in some way.
Another noteworthy theme of the story is death. According to the first line of Albert Camus’ essay, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” It echoes Kafka’s bleak aphorism: “A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.” In many of Kafka’s stories, the only way the contradiction or paradox of the protagonist is revolved is through death. This was the case in The Metamorphosis, where at the end the protagonist, Gregor Samsa dies. It was the case with The Trial, where at the end the protagonist, Joseph K dies. It was the case with the previous story, The Penal Colony, and it’s the case with this story as well where the sick young man dies in the end.
This brings us to the previous example of Sisyphus whose existential contradiction is a never-ending cycle of him trying to push back a rock which keeps falling downhill. The word ‘existential’ should be taken critically here because Kafka was not really an existentialist as many people think. Existentialists believe that yes, there is no meaning of life but they believe that we should all try to get comfortable in the void feeling that there is no meaning of life. But Kafka does not believe that. He thinks that we can never get comfortable in the void feeling, that we will always be trapped in enduring anxiety, worry and frustration of our contradictory self, in fact, he thinks that to get comfortable in one’s void feeling is itself a contradiction in its own right.
And so, once again, for him, the only ultimate way to resolve the contradictions of one’s life is death.
Thin, without fever, not cold, not warm, with empty eyes, without a shirt, the young man under the stuffed quilt heaves himself up, hangs around my throat and whispers in my ear, “Doctor, let me die.” — A Country’s Doctor
