/lit/ - Literature

Maybe some bored soul will read this in the archives, searching for Kafka to temporarily alleviate that soul-crushing, repetitive ennui that is this person's life.

Everyone, I feel, interprets Josef K. and K. as being representations of Kafka, and they interpret the frustrating, surrealistic plots as representations of how Kafka felt being alienated from the world. They are right... except the Kafka in question is not -Franz- Kafka, but his own father, Hermann Kafka. Let's see. Good old Franz said his father had, "strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, [and] knowledge of human nature". Franz himself, which most of you probably got reading the "Personality" section on his Wikipedia page, which I got a bit more thoroughly from a biography and his journals, was a weaker, humbler, dare I say wiser man. Certainly not the type to so straightforwardly go against the court, nor the type to be so sure of his own innocence. All of these traits which Kafka said his father had, they can certainly also be applied to Josef K. His endurance, practicality, no-bullshit, unself-pitying attitude already put out of the question the possibility of his neglecting his own health. Loudness of voice and eloquence? He more than displays that in his first cross-examination, along with his "self-satisfaction" and "worldly dominance" to such a point that he makes an ass of himself and only stirs the court up enough to make them realize and agree he doesn't deserve "the benefits a hearing of this sort always confers to the arrested."

Seriously.

Donald Barthelme would be a fucking regular

is there any good interpretations of the story "The School" by Donald Barthelme?

>pic related, it's the author, donald barthelme

does anyone here like donald barhtelme. i read some of his book "forty stories" and a lot of them are funny. list of stories that made me lol:
The Palace at Four A.M.
Conversations With Goethe
Paul Klee
Bluebeard
Departures