Content
The book focuses mainly on the biographical details of Kafka's life, interspersed with short illustrated vignettes from his writing. The author relates Kafka's personality and various incidents in his life to the content of his stories. For example, the fact that he saw himself as a burden on his family is compared to stories in which the protagonist is an animal - most notably The Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist Gregor Samsa awakes to find himself transformed into a giant bug, becoming a burden to his family and becoming no longer able to support them.
Whether or not these parallels can be drawn so easily is a question reagarding Psychoanalytic literary criticism and Authorial intent.
Read more about this topic: Introducing Kafka
Famous quotes containing the word content:
“In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Nothing can or shall content my soul
Till I am evened with him, wife for wife,
Or failing so, yet that I put the Moor
At least into a jealousy so strong
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