I met Franz Kafka 28 years ago when I was a university student who aspired to become a writer. The first book of Kafka I read was Description of a Struggle. The winter of 1990 was freezing, and we were living in an apartment in Abidinpaşa District of Ankara, two floors below the ground. I remember reading the book with a grey cover under the blanket because the electric stoves didn't warm the house. At that time, the United States organized the first Gulf War in Iraq, and we were worried about Ankara's bombing. So we were happy to be two floors below the ground, and our house was like a natural refuge.
Description of a Struggle didn't look like anything I'd read before. The author could tell what he wanted. However, I could not understand the character's thinking and concerns. Kafka's mindset was entirely unfamiliar to me, and I was not a mature literary reader, and I left the book unfinished.
Since communism was dissolved in Russia in 1991, the interest in writers such as Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky increased over time. The left-wing intellectuals were experiencing a great depression in the psychology of defeat. On the one hand, they were trying to understand and interpret what was going on. Kafka and Dostoevsky's work contributed to this effort to express these feelings and concerns.
Everyone was talking about Kafka, so a few years later, I read Kafka's novel The Metamorphosis, and this time I understood it partly. At least the first pages were quite clear; Gregor Samsa woke up from his restless dreams transformed to a bug and was worried that he was late for his job. It was tragicomic anxiety, and the family members' behavior toward poor Gregor was not friendly. Dostoyevsky's wish to turn into a bug expressed in the Notes From The Underground book was converted to Kafka's long story.
I also read The Trial novel because I liked The Metamorphosis. The Trial was as strange as the Metamorphosis. The main character Josef K. found out that he was being sued for a crime he didn't know, instead of turning into a bug when he woke up in the morning. What people would think in the workplace was again the most important cause of his anxiety. The Trial novel narrates Josef K.'s attempt to justify the crime that he did not know in a justice system that he couldn't understand. It was such a desperate effort that I was terrified while reading. The most critical deficiency of Kafka's characters was that they didn't know how to rebel. They were attempting to analyze the situation so detailed that their actions could not be effective. Kafka described the ruthless oppression of unorganized, socially isolated individuals accompanied by tragic events.
Kafka describes the enthusiasm the protagonist K. of joining the mysterious authorities that govern the village in another novel, The Castle. The aim of K., which is assigned to a town as a cadastral surveyor, is to create bridges between the bureaucracy and the people. Despite his persistent efforts, he could not reach Klamm, who lives in the castle. The castle would represent the state; it can be interpreted as representing God or reality. In his novel, Kafka described the weakness of an individual in the face of God, in the face of state and bureaucracy with a gloomy atmosphere and a maze of events.
Another obvious example of Kafka's works' tragi-comic aspect is the story of In the Penal Colony. In the story, the narrator tells horrifying events in such an insensitive tone that you are surprised. The sympathy of the people for the torture apparatus is also astonishing.
I want to mention some of the typical features of Kafka's works. It is an excellent way to present the book's issue in the first sentence or the first few sentences. This method allows the reader to get to the point immediately.
Franz Kafka created the main character names through variations of his first and last name. Gregor Samsa's last name, for example, evokes Kafka. The Trial novel Josef K.'s main character has a surname that consists of the first letter of the surname Kafka. The castle's protagonist is only known as K. Shortening character names symbolize their weak existence.
Kafka used places and weather to reflect the social position and inner world of characters. As he was born in a city like Prague, there are rich architectural depictions in his books. Details such as prolonged corridors, half-floors, sleeping characters in the workplace lockers are among the critical elements of Kafkaesque. The air is usually hazy, dirty, dark, wet, or rainy.
Kafka draws a rather dark panorama in his works, and Kafka's uncompromising pessimism appears clearly in the book Letter To Milena:
"Oh, Milena... It's like we're in the sea, we're drifting from here to there without swimming... If we don't drown, that's to be evil too."
"The animal pulls the whip from the hand of his master and whips himself to become his master. He does not know that this is nothing more than a dream caused by the new knot thrown into the whip of his master ."
Kafka can be said to be the embodiment of the gloom on Earth. He sees life as a war that has been lost all over at the beginning.
What is the secret to Kafka's literary success? Dedication to literature is an essential factor, I suppose. He succeeded in transforming his troubled life into art. It would be a mistake to think that his pessimism stems only from psychological delusions. He was a Prague Jew. The Germans did not love him because he was Jewish, and because he spoke German, he was despised by the Czechs. He has never been the ideal son of Hermann Kafka, his great and healthy father. He was frail and petty. He has often been ill, and he was too intelligent to be included in social life without questioning.
Even though he created hard-to-understand and gloomy works, he was a real person. He didn't have the defense mechanisms that ordinary people used to protect themselves. He showed the courage to cast his original personality and dark spirit into writing.
Thanks to Max Brod publishing his works in a manner contrary to his will, we have met this strange hero, trying to fight alone with the whole world, just like Don Quixote.
Image Sources: https://www.ntv.com.tr/turkiye/kafkanin-mirasi-ve-sirlari and http://www.arkakapak.com/franz-kafka-yalnizligi/