| Franz Kafka is an enigmatic writer. His abstruse novels reveal that he suffered from his own identity crisis as an eternal outsider and lonely wandering Jewish marginal man. His desperately seeking behavior represents his own oedipal conflict and castration fear. Furthermore, his early death signifies a tenacious yearning for death resulting from his powerful thanatos. His antinomic situation and dilemma in real life was clearly depicted in his works.
Kafka consistently dealt with several main themes such as guilt, judgement, missing, transformation, powerful authority, sick worm or vermin, the sufferings of the weak and hopeless etc. These themes reveal Kafka's preoccupation with the inevitable identity problem and his unresolved oedipal conflict, especially castration fear, defiance and obedience toward his father, repetitive failure in heterosexual relationships, and a masochistic inner fantasy world. All his works can be regarded as records of his own painful inner struggles. His short enigmatic life and works seem to suggest that modern people living with contradiction, confusion and absurdity have to solve a riddle he left as his last will. His novels, including Letter to His Father, are the result of thorough self-analysis and an extremely miserable self-mastery process. |
