Kafka’s Genius Philosophy

“I am free and that is why I am lost. ” Hey everyone, In this video, I will talk about one the most influential fiction writers  of the 20th century. Franz Kafka’s name alone has become a literary style called Kafkaesque.

He  wrote about human nightmares, a state of paralysis when your legs and arms fail you. Kafka’s  is a story of failure. A beautiful failure.

Before I start I have a confession, I  always thought Kafka was a complainer, constantly whining how terrible the  world is without offering any solutions. A prophet of doom. But then I read all his novels  and short stories.

How wrong I was about Kafka. In this video I will do three things.  First I will look at Kafka’s life, then summarise and discuss six  of his most famous stories, and finally 10 lessons we can learn from him.

I  have looked at all his novels and short stories and his life and come up with 10 simple lessons  we can learn from Kafka. Whether you’re a writer, artist or reader, Kafka has a lot to offer.  His story is a story of failure.

A beautiful failure. So sit back with a cup of coffee and  enjoy the video on how to fail and beautifully. Franz Kafka was born in 1882 in Prague  into a German-speaking Jewish family.

German at the time was seen as a more  instrumental language for social mobility. Kafka also spoke Czech, but not fluently.  Prague was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the time.

But towards the end of  Kafka’s life, the Empire collapsed in 1918 and the nation of Czechoslovakia was born.  This too split into two countries in 1993 as Czech and Slovakia. So he is generally considered  a Czech author despite writing in German.

His middle-class background allowed him to get  a good education and a university law degree and later worked at an insurance company. He found  his job a huge hinderance to his writing as he stayed at the office for long hours. Despite  that he managed to write in his free time, mainly in the evenings or at night.

In fact  it was his writing, a moment of freedom, that allowed him to cope with his stressful job  and life. He kept a diary throughout this period. He worked for 15 years and finally retired with  a pension at the age of 35.

But unfortunately his health deteriorated soon after as he died  two years later in 1924 after contracting tuberculosis. Despite a somewhat short life, he  left quite a good body of work behind. Now we have three novels and a great many short stories. 

He published very few of his writing during his lifetime. He left his writing with his friend  Max Brod and told him to burn them, but Brod went against Kafka and published them after his death.  Even his attempt to burn his stories failed.

Kafka was twice engaged to a woman and on both  occasions it was called off due to his health. His limitless sex drive forced him to visit  prostitutes. He did supposedly father one child, but we cannot be certain.

He was pessimistic  about his relationships. In one his letters to his lover, he talks of being bound to her by hand  like those French couples bound together who were led to scaffold during the French Revolution. Even  in that intense moment of romantic expression, he cannot think but a doomed end, instead of  altar he talks about scaffold.

His pessimism came true. They never got married. In all his novels,  there is only one example of his main character fathering a child, which he runs away from by the  way.

All his other protagonists have no children. This theme of fatherhood is  very important in his writing. Now Kafka had a tough relationship with his own  father.

It’s no secret that he didn't like his father. In a letter to his father in 1919, Kafka  wrote: “My writing was all about you. ” In all his writing, the main characters fight an illogical,  oppressive authority figure, so we can assume that Kafka’s writing was his way of expressing his  distaste for the way his father had treated him.

Kafka remained a timid person, and  incredibly critical of his writing. He also had three sisters, who outlived  him but they all sadly ended up in Nazi concentration camps in 1940s and died there.  Kafka wasn't religious in his outlook, but later in life he did try to  reconnect with his Jewish heritage.

The term Kafkaesque in English is used to  describe a style of writing that is dark, gloomy, stifling and often about a powerless individual  oppressed by a powerful authority figure. Almost a nightmarish feeling of paralysis  that is common in all his stories. Kafka made sure to name all his characters,  or most of them, with the letter ‘K’ in their names.

When you read him, keep  your eyes open for names beginning with K or just K. In other words, Kafka. If you write  fiction, litter it with your own name, or the first letter of your name.

One day you will have a  style of writing named after you, like Kafkaesque. Kafka was influenced by existentialist  philosophers like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. You can  see those influences in his writing.

For example, Nietzsche famously proclaimed that  god is dead. In the absence of god, the whole idea of truth is questioned. If you think about, it  created a massive shift in intellectual thoughts because religion and god were no longer the  existential anchor.

Now you have to find meaning somewhere else. Kafka’s protagonists struggle  to find the truth. Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer talked about how suffering is inherent part of  human condition.

All Kafka’s main characters suffer a great deal and none, except one, escape  their miserable life. His literary influences were Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Later I  will discuss the similarities between his writing and these authors.

Dostoevsky’s novel, The Double  seems to have inspired Kafka’s the Metamorphosis. Also important to note that Kafka was born  only a year after Dostoevsky died in 1882. Kafka has influenced many novelists and artists. 

The one author whom I have spoken a lot on this channel is Kazuo Ishiguro who often writes  about bizarre incidents that appear like dream or nightmare more than reality. In his  novel the Unconsoled or When We Were Orphan and even in Never Let Me Go we  can feel Kafka talking to us. Another author is Murakami who  even titled one of his novels, Kafka on the Shore after him, in which the  main protagonist escapes his oppressive father.

Kafka’s influence on literature is so immense  that it will take hours to list them all here. Kafka wrote three novels and many short stories. Here I will summarise and discuss his  three novels and three short stories.

Amerika or The Man Who Disappeared is an  incomplete novel published posthumously in 1927, but it was written in 1912, so  considered Kafka’s first novel. It’s the story of Karl a 16 year old, naïve and  good-hearted European who is forced to flee to America after getting an older servant pregnant.  In America he makes a few friends, some good but most of them exploit him or gets him into trouble  with those in possession of power.

At first he stays at his uncle’s house where life couldn't be  any better. His future looks very promising. But then suddenly thrown out for visiting his friend  without permission.

Later Karl manages to gets a job, but dismissed for breaking the rules. At the  end he gets a job at a theatre but we don't know what happens to him. At least we know that by the  end, he is still alive and things are looking up.

It’s Kafka’s only story that ends in happiness of  sort. As I mentioned in my video on Italo Calvino, Amerika was his favourite novel of all time.  As a first novel, we can see that Kafka was still optimistic about the world.

There is a  hint of Dickens in this novel. Karl’s uncle happens to be in America and randomly meets him.  Kafka himself confesses that his inspiration for Amerika came from Charles Dickens.

The story does  appear like a young man going to America to make a life for himself or pursuing the American  dream just like in Dickens’s novels Great Expectations or David Copperfield. Karl is not a  very strong character as there are bigger forces, or tides in which he drifts around. This novel is  less Kafkaesque.

Amerika is the only attempt Kafka made to escape. America as the land of freedom.  After this novel, Kafka gave up any hope of freedom.

Now we enter into Kafka’s nightmare  world. We need a candle. It’s really dark The Trial was published in 1925, but it was  written in 1914 or there about.

If Amerika was inspired by Charles Dickens, The Trial was  clearly a novel in the mould of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I should also point out that  this novel is also incomplete. What’s the story?

Josef K, a simple banker, is arrested for a crime  he doesn't know he has committed and by people who never identify themselves. If that’s not weird  enough, he is not even sent to prison, so he’s free while trying to work his case. Justice  is twisted here, it’s his job to prove himself innocent, not the authorities to prove him guilty. 

He gets a lawyer who happens to make things much more difficult for him and almost becomes like  a slave master the way he controls his clients. He then approaches other people to help him but  nobody is able to. Finally on his thirty-fifth birthday Josef is arrested again by two men and  executed outside the city without he ever finding out what his crime was.

Josef K feels he deserves  punishment despite not knowing what his crime is. Dostoevsky at least told us about Raskolnikov’s  crime and the detectives who worked the case. Kafka turns things upside down and takes us into  a complete nightmare where we don't know what’s going on.

We follow Josef K as he struggles to  find out his case. At some point I had the feeling that he wasn't arrested at all, instead he was  following the police and claiming that he was, perhaps seeking attention. Josef moves through  space almost in a dream, suspended, always in limbo as if life itself is a sentence.

I think  Kafka is telling us that life itself is a trial. We have to prove our worth in society. We are only  treated well if we can prove that we are innocent, useful and keeping our head low and working hard. 

If not, you’re discarded by the system in the same way ants and bees discard useless members in  their colony. Bureaucracy has replaced human discretion and has become a labyrinth or a maze  to discipline, normalise and control individuals. In big cities, you cannot deal with people on  a face-to-face basis.

Good luck picking a phone and calling a customer service of any big company.  They have set up a system that treats everyone the same, therefore rigid rules can appear arbitrary  and cruel to the individual. But it makes sure the city runs smoothly, so the plight of a single  individual is not its concern.

Just like in an ants colony, individual ants are worthless.  Nations are a close mimic of an ant colony. Individuals are sacrificed for the good  of the system, authority and colony and country.

Dostoevsky put the blame on the  individual to take responsibility for their crimes and mistakes. Kafka puts the blames on the  system for inventing crimes to punish individuals. Modern world with its intricate bureaucracy and  specialisation has stripped the individuals of any power to influence things.

The nightmare  continues in Kafka’s other novel, The Castle. The Castle was written in 1922 when Kafka was in a  hotel recovering from TB so the remote location of the setting perhaps alludes to the hotel location.  The Castle is also incomplete and published in 1926.

By now you might have guessed that Kafka  actually didn't complete any of his novels. Unlike his other novels which he gave up finishing  them, Kafka failed to finish the Castle because he died at the hotel. The Castle is about a land  surveyor who thinks he has been invited by someone in the castle to do a job.

But upon arrival,  he is told that the request was a mistake. But he lingers around in the village still trying to  find the person who requested his service. It’s a futile effort of a man who moves into a village  and wants to be recognised by the authorities.

It’s a closed village, especially to those  coming from town. Just like in the Trial, here too the protagonist desperately tries  to live in the village legally but unable to find ways to achieve it. Here the court  system is replaced with a village and castle, perhaps alluding to a more older time  when empires and kings ruled places.

In the Trial the court system allude to  modern world where authority has become faceless. In the Castle too, K never manages  to meet the authorities, the people in charge. Unlike in the Trial, where we don't know the  location, we get to know the remote rural location of the castle in winter.

The village seems like  a typical village and has two hotels, a five star called Castle Inn and a cheap hotel called  Bridge Inn. Here the idea of community, a sense of belonging is very central and the main motivation  for K as he tries to avoid the solitude that is depicted in the Trial. K tries many different ways  to go to the castle, or contact it or understand or enter it, but always fails.

There are millions  of obstacles. It’s like an outsider in a circle, and nobody wants to include you. The castle is  like an old language that K is trying to decipher.

The title in German also means lock. It’s perhaps  humans attempt to get to truth, implying that it is impossible to find the truth. Religious or  scientific truth.

Human society is like a tangled web of bureaucracy and legal system that makes  the individual powerless and defeated. Kobo Abe’s novel The Woman in the Dunes is very similar. A  man accidentally arrives at a village and gets tangled in a web of sand that he never manages  to get out, like an ant stuck in something.

Now I will look at three of  his most famous short stories. The Metamorphosis was written in 1912  published in 1915 is the first on the list that was completed by Franz Kafka,  but years after its publication he said he didn't like the ending and wished he  could change it. In the Metamorphosis, just in the Ovid’s Metamorphoses of Roman  period, a human turns into an animal.

In Kafka’s story Gregor Samsa a traveling salesman  wakes up to find himself turned into an insect or vermin, something repulsive. Initially he hopes  it’s a temporary state but as days pass, he slowly realises that this is no nightmare. It’s real that  he’s no longer human.

Unable to leave his room he reflects on his job and those around him, and his  desperate situation as the sole bread-winner of the family. His absence at works alerts his boss  who sends someone to visit him. His family and colleague fail to communicate to him.

His father  tries to keep him inside the room, in the process injures him twice. Only his sister, Greta brings  food for him. Then one day their tenants notice him and they are repulsed.

They decide to  leave the house without paying rent. Now their financial situation is dire. Gregor’s sister,  his only close ally has had enough and tells his father to get rid of it.

This realisation  that he’s no longer wanted, Gregor starves himself to death. The family takes a vacation  to refresh themselves and plan Greta’s wedding. There is a million interpretation of this story. 

Some say it’s religious. Some say it’s feminist. Some say it is father complex.

Nabokov suggested  it was the struggle of an artist living in crappy world. Some say it’s not about Gregor at all,  it is all about his sister, Greta. I personally think a lot of those interpretations seem a bit  far-fetched.

Just as in Ovid’s Metamorphosis there is a lot melodrama here. Ovid depicted men as  active and women as passive, Kafka turns it upside down and shows how miserable a man who is passive  and without his job. Gregor’s only function in the family was to provide for them.

Without bringing  in any food, he is not only useless but also a parasite. Without fulfilling his role as provider,  you might as well be dead. You can see that Kafka was twice engaged to the same woman and each  time it was called off because Kafka was deemed too sickly to be marriage material or a good  provider.

Kafka was a provider for his own family however his future in-laws dismissed him as too  sickly to fulfil his masculine role in society. So Gregor Samsa in the Metamorphosis is any man  deemed useless in society. I think Kafka tells us that your value to society and to some extent to  your family is only as long as you’re a provider, useful and productive member.

Once you’re no  longer able to do that, you have no worth. The Hunger Artist was written in 1922. It’s  about an artist who impresses people with his ability to fast for days.

It’s like David Blaine  the magician who went without food for 44 days. After a while people get bored, and  watch some animals perform in a circus. The hunger artist is ignored by everyone and  someone accidentally finds him in a box on the verge of death.

He tells people that he shouldn't  be admired. Why? His ability to fast was due to him unable to find the food he liked.

The story  ends with him dying after 40 days of fasting and replaced by a panther with insatiable appetite for  food. Kafka himself died soon after writing The Hunger Artist. Throughout history artistic trends  come and go.

Great artists often die unrecognised. He survived for days when people were watching  him. Artists need an audience to motivate them, sustain them.

This is an innate human desire to  be admired by others. This mirrors Kafka’s own life. During his lifetime, he didn't get the  recognition and respect we have for him today.

Bucket Rider: It was written in 1917 but published  in 1921. The story is about a man so poor that he can fly. On a cold winter day, he sets off to  get some coal from the coal dealer but he has no money to pay.

When he arrives at the shop, the  coal-dealers, a husband and wife, don't notice him. The poor man shouts but they cannot hear his  voice. He’s so poor that he has become invisible, weightless and inaudible.

At the end he flies  away towards the ice mountain and disappears. Poverty means you have nothing. No  voice.

No weight. And invisible. As we can in all his stories, Kafka is concerned  with the powerless individual against society, usually the authority, the powerful, the  mighty.

Individuals are usually unjustly and unfairly tossed around like a football. Another  theme that runs throughout his writing is someone arguing his case against somebody. This is partly  because of his own experience with his father who Kafka could never impress and partly because  as a lawyer he always dealt with people pleading their cases.

As I already mentioned, most of his  characters have K as names or the first letter of their names. Karl, K and Klara. His novels and  stories are quite short in comparison to other authors of the same period, like Robert Musil,  Thomas Mann, and Marcel Proust, all of whom I have discussed here in this channel.

That’s because he  had a full-time job, unlike those other authors who were perhaps more privileged. Despite their  short length, they are not easy to read sometimes. They need your full attention like most  modernist novels.

You can't be passive. If you want to start with something easy,  read Amerika and then read his other novels. Now, what can we learn from Kafka?

If you read all  his books, you get a distinct feeling that he is a prophet of doom and gloom. Afterall, none of  his protagonists win anything. But rest assured, on the surface Kafka may appear quite pessimistic, he has a few great lessons in his sleeves that  can help us even today.

Whether you’re a writer, artist, or even reader, Kafka provide  some amazing lessons for you. Lesson 1: Failure can be beautiful In all Kafka’s works, failure is the most dominant theme. The only exception is Amerika where the  protagonist doesn't die by the end.

If one has to characterise Kafka’s works, it would be this.  He was a beautiful artist of mourning and grief. His stories are cries and sobs of human condition. 

He was a beautiful cry artist who sobbed at every failure. Who told stories of failure.  Perhaps he was the best artist of reality.

Failure despite being seen as negative, is not  always bad. In fact our evolution is only possible when our genes make mistake. Through mutation,  we die but also survive.

So every failure has either the seeds for future success or if not,  it can be a moment of beauty. In the same way tragedies can be beautifully told and enjoyed. In  fact if one has to characterise Kafka’s own life, on the surface it’s a failure.

He didn't get  married despite several attempts. He was never happy about his work and never finished any of his  novels. He wasn't famous or financially successful during his lifetime.

But there is beauty in those  failures. Because to win, one has to give his own life. Kafka did.

His failures in his personal  life gave inspirations to millions of people who found their stifled voices in his writing.  So there is beauty to be found in failure. Lesson 2: Life is a series of interruptions “Evil is whatever distracts.

” We have dreams. We wait for the right moment.  We think the condition is not right to start our projects.

We think one day we can start doing  something. Kafka had the same feeling. He had a desk job in an insurance company and worked long  hours.

Kafka writes in his diaries: “Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be  nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely,  and this is by no means a remote possibility. ” His day job was a hindrance because he was never  free enough to dedicate more time on his writing. He didn't finish any of his novels.

He even  hated the ending of the Metamorphosis. He says could’ve written it much better if  it wasn't because of his business trips. He was constantly interrupted.

But he also had  the habit of just leaving his novels unfinished. Like a promiscuous person going through many  relationships and break-ups. If you have not finished any of Kafka’s novels, don't feel  bad because he never completed them in the first place.

So the lesson here is to ride  through life’s endless interruptions and find moments you can sail. Use the little moment you  get to write your next short story. Don't wait for a perfect condition, because there  is never a perfect time to do anything.

Lesson 3: Life is absurd “The meaning of life is that it stops. ” If there is one thing that ties all Kafka’s  writing is the absurdities of modern life. There are so many moments in the stories of  his characters getting lost in the illogical or irrational maze of legal system or some other  entanglements.

You get the feeling that nothing makes sense. That’s precisely the point. We may  think life has a purpose.

We may think we are going somewhere. We may think that things we do  have a meaning. But if you stand back and assess things more clearly, you may find that not  everything makes sense.

Not everything has meaning. Not everything happens for a reason.  Sometimes good things or bad just happens.

Kafka depicts these moments of life so beautifully and  so brutally. One can see that in Kafka’s writing, life’s for the most part absurd, irrational and  has no inherent meaning. All we can do is just accept its meaninglessness and absurdities.

Just  the mere acceptance of it may liberate us from our own insistence to give everything a meaning.  Absurdities of life are normal human conditions. Accepting this fact may give us some breathing  space to enjoy it more and to be good to others.

Lesson 4: We’re all alone One of the most heart-breaking story by Kafka is the Metamorphosis and how lonely  is Gregor once he is transformed into an animal. His family slowly gets tired of him and wants  him dead. Their compassion can only go so far.

When they see him not useful in the house  as he no longer brings food on the table, he also causes their tenants to flee the house.  Their compassion slowly turns to disgust. Gregor spent his adult life providing for his  family.

That was his role. The lesson here is that ultimately we are alone. Understand it and don't  feel sorry for yourself when others abandon you.

In fact lower your expectations of anything you  do and understand that you won’t be rewarded for all your deeds. In all Kafka’s stories, lonely  protagonists battling to be accepted by a group, community and or authority and they fail. Life  is a lonesome journey, so be useful to others but don't expect too much.

No matter how hard you  worked, or how much you sacrificed your life for others, don't expect to be rewarded. Sometimes an  individual can be fragile, like a dandelion seed at the mercy of wind. We should understand that  loneliness is constant and belonging is temporary.

Lesson 5: Life is full of ironies Kafka’s friend, Max Brod tells us that they would laugh aloud when reading the  beginning of the Trial when Josef K is arrested for god knows what crime. Both the Metamorphosis  and The Trial can be read as dark comedies. In the Castle too some of the events are so illogical and  comically stupid that you can't help but laugh.

In the face of utter failure, all we can do is  laugh. Life is full of ironies. There are some big ironies about modern life, for example.

Food  is supposed to keep us alive, but in some rich countries, there is so much food that it has  become a major killer through obesity-related illnesses. Modernity had promised everyone more  free time, but people in affluent countries are the busiest of all. Justice system was supposed  to protect the weak, but it has become like a spider web that only catches the weak, while the  strong can tear through.

Gregor Samsa spent his entire life providing for his family, and they  were the first who wanted him dead. Kafka tells us that in the face of life’s terrible ironies,  we might as well laugh at it. If you have kids, don't put too much pressure on them like Kafka’s  father did to Kafka.

If you pester your kids too much and give them a hard time, you might produce  another Kafka. Now that’s a Kafkaesque irony. Lesson 6: You can’t know everything Western civilisation or modernity is predicated on the idea that through science we  can know everything.

In other words, there is an absolute truth and we can discover. This pursuit  is at the heart of most of Kafka’s stories. In the Trail Josef K desperately tries to find his crime,  but fails.

In the Castle, K puts a lot of effort to find the man who requested his service but  fails. In a way Kafka tells us that knowledge is never absolute, it is always relative. Even our  language is just an approximation.

Kafka says, quote: ‘All language is but a poor translation. ’  The same can be said about art. No language, science or art can capture reality as it is.

No  language is able to express the real feelings of an individual. Nowadays we can say that  not only knowing everything is not possible, but it may not even be desirable. We  live in a world where we are sometimes overwhelmed by too much information and  knowledge that we shut ourselves to have a moment of respite.

Kafka shows that no matter  how much you try, you cannot know everything. Lesson 7: Human Being is not sacred In the Metamorphosis, Kafka shows us that human life is pretty ordinary. He challenges us to  question the traditional notion of human created by god or a special creature of god.

Gregor Samsa  turns into a disgusting insect or vermin. This is more in keeping in how evolution sees humans as  just another species among millions of species. In fact, sometimes the insect is translated as  cockroach.

In evolutionary history cockroaches are the most successful animals. They have existed for  250 millions years, which predates the dinosaurs and they're still going strongly. It’s only us  humans who see ourselves as somewhat special or even sacred.

Kafka questions such myth. Our  culture has given us the sacred notion of human life. This ego-centric view is most likely  imposed on us or taught to us by society, but in reality we are bound by our own body that nature  has provided us.

Gregor Samsa has a human mind but an animal body. That is what we are. We’re not  special or divine, so let’s not treat ourselves as such.

And we are perfectly fine to be ordinary  because there is so much beauty in the ordinary. Lesson 8: Don't give up the fight One of the most interesting thing about Kafka’s heroes is that despite the odds  being stuck up against them, they never give up. As readers we see they have no chance in such  brutal circumstances.

But none of them give up. They continue their struggles to the very end.  In Hunger Artist, the artist starves himself to death.

In the Metamorphosis, Gregor too starves  himself to death. Both refuse to eat which show their determination and doggedness. In the Trial  and the Castle, the protagonists never stop their pursuit until they’re killed.

The authorities  or regimes or the powerful tire them down. Wear them down. Create millions of obstacles. 

Bureaucracy is like a maze. In the past, kings used to discipline people with brute force  through physical torture, but in in modern world, authorities and companies have created walls  around them, which we call bureaucracy and institutions as obstacles. Bureaucracy  seems almost inevitable in modern world.

We see governments and companies have set up call  centres or computerised systems that sometimes it feels you’re treated like zoo animals, all fenced  up in a kind of maze and labyrinth. Kafka shows us that if our notion of human being is a myth and  illusion, so is power once you penetrate it. In other words, nothing lasts forever.

Despite  his pessimism, Kafka wasn't a defeatist. Defeatist don't write or tell stories, they do  nothing. Kafka wrote about it.

Consistently. Until his very last breath. So don't give up  the fight for the individual.

Authorities and companies have their resources, but individuals  have their wit and dogged persistence. Lesson 9: Alienation is universal One of the most prevalent themes of Kafka’s writing is alienation. Individuals  are alienated from their families, communities, and even from themselves.

His characters  are distancing themselves from others, or sometimes forced to isolation.  Alienation is not a modern invention, but modernity made it universal. Even powerful  people are alienated.

In recent months we heard about the British Royal family and how individuals  felt excluded and alienated. In pre-modern world, most humans were attached to a piece of land,  either through ownership or through slavery or through peasantry. In today’s world, most of us  don't have such attachment to land or farming.

Most of us don't know where our food is coming  from. We don't really care. I mean most of us.

What modernity did to us to turn us into product.  We have become like commodities. Our information is used as a product and sold by social media  companies.

We track our own very movement every day and pass that information to these giant  media companies to use it to sell us products or sometimes use to manipulate us in some way.  Modern life to some extent resembles a zoo. Safer, relatively more comfortable but at the  same time there are rules and boundaries.

Kafka was one of the first writers to  make alienation central to his writing. Lesson 10: Tell stories Despite all his pessimism, doom and gloom in Kafka’s writing, he didn't  resign. Instead he used every free hour of his time to write and tell stories.

He dedicated his  life to the art of storytelling. One of the most haunting aspect of Kafka is his powerful voice.  So having a voice is one of the best thing you can have.

It's in a way a debt to your community,  society to tell your stories and those around you. Kafka spent years perfecting his craft  and he was never happy about it. The reason none of his novels were given a proper ending  was because Kafka was still honing his craft.

He was diligent. He wanted more precision in his  writing. On the one hand Kafka dedicated his life to literature and storytelling, but on the other  hand, he found writing and storytelling as his saviour from the monotony of life and work.

It  was his craft but also his escape. It was his goal but also his hobby. He was artistic but also  found the art itself his cure, his healing.

So Kafka teaches us that despite the fact that life  has no inherent meaning, is full of failures, obstacles, all you can do is tell stories.  Tell great stories. Tell your stories.

Tell stories. If you fail, fail beautifully!  In the very act of telling your stories.

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