He went swimming and followed the vogue for nudism. He had his fair share of sexual affairs, and he complemented those with visits to brothels (Johnson, 2005).
Doubts about his work caused Kafka before his death to ask that all of his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed. His friend, Max Brod, ignored his instructions. Brod published the novels the Trial, the Castle, and Amerika in 1925, 1926, and 1927, and a collection of shorter pieces, the Great Wall of China, in 1931. These early works by Kafka as Description of a Struggle and Meditation are thought to be original in a characteristic way, even though their style is more concretely imaged and their structure more incoherent than that of the later works. The characters in these works all fail to set up communication with others. They follow a concealed logic that breaks normal, everyday logic. Their world explodes in grotesque incidents and violence. Each character is only a tormented voice, ineffectively questing for information and understanding of the world and for a way to believe in his own identity and purpose (Franz Kafka, 2010).
Kafka did not see his writing as a gift in the traditional sense. He considered both his talent for writing and what he produced as a writer curses for some unidentified sin. Since Kafka was agnostic or even an atheist, it is often assumed his sense of sin and curse were merely metaphors.
1. Kafka believed that he was a gifted writer. This was a fact that he recorded in his diaries.
2. He felt cursed by this gift. He hated the need to write and the desire for public praise.
3. Kafka spent...
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