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9004950 No.9004950 [Reply] [Original]

Why couldn't he finish any of his work? Was he lazy or just retarded?

>> No.9004961
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9004961

>>9004950

>> No.9004977
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9004977

hah he wrote the buggo man

>> No.9005697

>>9004950

>"there's hope, but not for us"
-Kafka to Max Brod

i think the answer to your question is related to the reason Kafka wanted to burn his manuscripts when he died. His work is supremely demoralising and I think I even recall his last words (not sure if to Brod or in his notebooks) being that his work has no value because it doesn't offer any solutions. And in a way he's right - there can be no possible happy ending for the protagonist of a Kafka novel doesn't offer any solutions to the problem of living in modernity. This makes them supremely demoralising for readers. At least by not finishing them he offers to the reader the abstract possibility of a deus ex machina occurring, even though he couldn't bring himself to write such a contrived ending himself.

>> No.9005765

>>9004950

He wasn't real

>> No.9006892

>>9005697
from Camus essay about Kafka:

"In this universe devoid of progress, Kafka is going to instill hope in a strange form. The Trial propounds a problem which The Castle to a certain degree, solves. The more tragic the condition described by Kafka, the firmer and more agressive the hope becomes. The more truly absurd The Trial is, the more moving and illegitmate the impassioned "leap" of The Castle seems.

Here we find again in a pure state the paradox of existential thought as it is expressed for instance, by Kierkegaard: " Earthly hope must be killed; only then can we be saved by true hope" This particular view will be better understood if I say that truly hopeless thought just happens to be defined by the opposite criteria and that the tragic work might be the work that, after all future hope is exiled, described the life of a happy man. Kafka's unbeleivable verdict is this hideous and upsetting world in which the very moles dare to hope.