The Bible's notion of the "promised land" has had a profound influence on secular literature. Modern authors have reinterpreted this biblical ideal to include any land of redemption or salvation. This is an important concept in both Dostoevsky's...

In Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" and in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's " A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," an understanding of the cruelty of mankind is revealed through an examination of the themes and the characters in both of their stories....

In his short story "A Hunger Artist," Franz Kafka uses the extreme example of the fictional hunger artist to discuss the dichotomy between art and life. Usually, an artist uses his life to create his art. Thus, an artist alienated from the world...

“For he alone knew, what no other initiate knew, how

easy it was to fast. It was the easiest thing in the world.”

– Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist”

What does it mean to willfully fast, or to deny hunger, the most fundamental of human drives? The short...

In A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka, one can argue the character of the Hunger Artist is an absurdist anti-hero parallel to the heroic figure of Jesus Christ in the Holy Bible. The Hunger Artist is a narration of a "starving, dying art", and one of...

In "A Report to an Academy," the marvelous transformation of the fictional ape Rotpeter offers striking insight into human adaptive behavior, and blurs and then elucidates the differences between man and ape. The short story, written as a letter...

In order to address the paradoxes of eroticism and human desire for intimacy in The Trial, it is important to recognize the ongoing theme of bondage (in the classic master/slave sense). Without this undercurrent of power and servitude, it is...

Nihilism is "the destruction of everything without pity" (Palmieri, 3). A completely different movement that is sometimes lumped together with Nihilism is Existentialism, which is a belief that "the world is without meaning or purpose." It also...

Since its original date of publication in 1925, Franz Kafka’s The Trial has resisted interpretation. At first glance, the novel’s seemingly simple and serial sequence of events poses no problem for the reader. Though the incidents that involve...

In The Trial, Franz Kafka tells the story of Joseph K., a man under persecution of the law. The novel begins with the arrest of K., which inducts him into a seemingly bizarre legal system. The arrest proves peculiar, as K. is never told what he is...

The Trial is the most well-known novel of Franz Kafka, published in Berlin in 1926. The original manuscripts were collected and prepared fo publishing by Max Brod, Kafka’s closest friend, two years after the author’s death. Brod says that the...

The Sixth Amendment in the Bill of Rights ensures that any American citizen accused of a crime has the right to a fair trial; in other words, those who have been accused must be informed of the crimes that they are accused of, and are given the...

Local color is a genre of literature which seeks to record a specific way of life at a certain time and space therefore the main components of a local color fiction is: One of the prime features undoubtedly of local color fiction is location –...

Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country Doctor (1884) is classified as a local color fiction because of the encapsulated elements of time, space, memory, romanticism, stock characters, language, and the predominant city versus country theme. Local color...

“It was a machine like no other.”

The opening lines of Franz Kafka’s work ‘In the Penal Colony’ puts forward a cryptic yet insightful simile that sets the mood of the entire story. Kafka’s simile offers little further clarification, yet categorizes...

Because essentially all faiths propose a set of moral and behavioral laws upon which one is expected to base one’s life decisions, religion and criminality are inexorably linked. While today in our society we aim to separate the two controversial...

When faced with injustices, it is far easier to say one would act against them than actually physically or verbally doing so. In Franz Kafka’s “In The Penal Colony,” when invited, an explorer is subjected to observe an inhumane execution where...

Franz Kafka subverts the idea of the romanticized past with “In the Penal Colony” particular in the character of The Officer. The Officer is the kind of character that one encounters at trade shows. This is a man who knows everything about a...

In the short story In the Penal Colony, Franz Kafka utilizes his characters and their dialogue to foreshadow future events in the story and to relate the individual characters to the story’s overarching theme of corruption and justice. Throughout...

It is a cynical statement, but it is frighteningly valid: contemporary liberal societies are little more than disciplinary dystopias. Many different phenomena reveal this, especially when understood through the framework of Michel Foucault’s...

Language is definitive of humanity. Spoken, written, or signed, every type of communication is essential to human interaction and is a crucial feature of civilization that differentiates humans from animals. Franz Kafka, author of The...

The aim of this essay is to investigate to what extent Kafka conveys a collapse in communication, how he achieves this enterprise, the significance of this goal, and the effect his literary decisions have upon the reader’s perception of the...

Like death or abandonment, alienation is one of the deepest-rooted fears experienced by human beings. As social creatures, humans have the need to identify themselves as one of a group, whether that group is a family, a culture, or a religion. The...

In Franz Kafka's stories "The Metamorphosis", "In The Penal Colony", and "The Fasting-Artist", the protagonists, Gregor Samsa, the officer, and the fasting-artist, each make apparent sacrifices. These characters give their lives for others, but...