One of the influences of Kafka over later writers is not so much in the content of his work as in its form.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It is not Kafka's fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.
I was first introduced to Kafka's writing during my compulsory army-service basic training. During that period, Kafka's fiction felt hyperrealistic.
Since my first encounter with Kafka's writing, I've been interested in a quality that, while he was alive, stood in the way of his achieving a large reputation: his allegory.
I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.
Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.
To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like 'The Hunger Artist.' Nothing is like 'The Metamorphosis.'
Kafka's inevitable tropism for the allegorical puts him in marked opposition to the realism that dominated the literary world of the first half of the 20th century.
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
Kafka is not interested in documenting the manners and mores of any particular place; he is not interested in probing the psyche of individual characters.