Franz Kafka: Faith and Vocation

Author(s): D. S. Savage
Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1946), pp. 222-240
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 FRANZ KAFKA: FAITH AND VOCATION

By D. S. SAVAGE

PRESENT critical opinion of Kafka would seem to be

divided between the view that he was a religious genius
and a consummate artist, and the contrary view that his
personality was psychopathic and his work a continuous case
book of his neurotic obsessions. There has been much discussion
of the "symbolism" of Kafka, but it seems to me useless to dis
cuss this question until one has made up one's mind which of these
two views contains the more truth. Kafka is in any case patently
a "problem" figure, and for any understanding of his method of
work it is necessary first to arrive at some understanding of the
total pattern which is given us in his work as a whole. It is
to this end that the present essay is written.
It may be convenient to begin with a glance at one of the
representatives of the second point of view?the psychopatho
logical. In the Spring 1943 number of Accent, Mr. Edwin
Berry Burgum has an article entitled "Franz Kafka and the
Bankruptcy of Faith" in which he gives forceful expression to
the opinion that Kafka is significant chiefly as a symptom of social
decadence. His article begins by speaking of the "lost genera
tion" of American writers of the twenties, but?

. . . American writers were by no means so lost at that time

as their contemporaries in defeated Germany, and the im
portance of Kafka is that he was without question the most
lost of them all. The fact that he was born of Jewish mid
dle class parents in Prague when it was under Austrian domi
nation only emphasized an alienation and insecurity which
had become typical of the middle class generally. Cultur
ally, moreover, Kafka was a German. He lived in Germany
and wrote in the German language. His own diseased per

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 D. S. SAVAGE 223

sonality symbolized the disease at the heart

ciety. The progress of his personal deterior
the degeneration of the society that produ
his own life ended as abruptly and prematurely
young republic, though he died of tuberculo
before Hitler set himself up as the brutal f
of the German people.1

From the beginning Mr. Burgum is determined

in his social perspectives and to interpret him in
is significant that throughout his essay he depen
a criterion of "normality." Had Kafka been
(or been born in more "normal" circumstances
sumably, have come to satisfactory terms wit
have found no necessity for the tortuous and tort
self-analysis of which his writing is an expre
Burgum, considering Kafka's later writings, conc

Fantasy and hallucination now are the last r

who never had faith in humanity and coul
a faith in God. His had been the symbolic
the German personality. But he was forced
death and madness alone. For Hitler had no
the fantasy of a fantasy in his confraternity o
who for the time being were able to distort t
the hallucination of a glory. We who are
situated than Kafka can draw from his nove
pleasure that there too we should have gone if
unable to believe in the potentialities of demo
common man.1

This final phrase should be enough to reveal th

Mr. Burgum makes his approach. But this is
facile a judgment. Whether we like it or not,
tainly preoccupied with pressing problems to whic
solution of a "belief in democracy and the com
entirely impertinent. And yet, on the other

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224 FRANZ KAFKA: FAITH AND VOCATION

features about Kafka's work which make it impossible for us

to accept the valuation placed upon him by his admirers: by Mr.
Muir, for example, when, comparing The Castle with The Pil
grim's Progress, he writes:

If anyone wanted to estimate how immensely more difficult

it is for a religious genius to see his way in an age of scepti
cism than in an age of faith, a comparison of The Pilgrim's
Progress with The Castle might give him a fair measure
of it. Yet hardly a fair measure, perhaps. For Bunyan's
mind was primitive compared with the best minds of his
age, and Kafka's is more subtly sceptical than the most
sceptical of our own. Its scepticism, however, is grounded on
a final faith, and this is what must make his novels appear
paradoxical, perhaps even incomprehensible, to some con
temporary readers. His scepticism is not an attitude or a
habit; it is a weapon for testing his faith and his doubt alike,
and for discarding from them what is inessential.2

If one is able to accept that view of Kafka?the view that he

was a religious genius who has something meaningful to contrib
ute to our knowledge of spiritual reality?then we may be
able to accept Mr. Muir's further statement that

What he sets out to do is to find out something about those

(unknown, heavenly) powers, and the astonishing thing is
that he appears to succeed. While following the adventures
of his heroes we seem to be discovering?almost without
being fully aware of it?various things about those entities
which we have never divined before, and could never per
haps have divined by ourselves. We are led in through
circle after circle of a newly found spiritual domain, where
everything is strange and yet real, and where we recognize
objects without being able to give them a name ... his
allegory is not a mere recapitulation or recreation; it does
not run on lines already laid down; it is a pushing forward
of the mind into unknown places; and so the things he
describes seem to be actual new creations which had never
existed before. They are like palpable additions to the

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 D. S. SAVAGE 225

intellectual world, and ones which cannot

at a single glance, for there is meaning
form behind form, in them all.2

The difficulty with which such a presenta

us is the insuperable one that Kafka leaves us
all to the problems which he has been exp
are certainly raised, but no conclusion is co
themselves trail off into uncertainty, uncom
and frustration reign. The Trial, as a trial,
K. is assassinated out of hand; the Castle is
its few messages remain always of dubious au
the later stories induce in us a belief that Ka
goal which he had set himself. And we c
simpletons as to suppose that in fact Kafka
goal. The conclusion to which we may well
was certainly a "case," though not so obviou
gum thinks: and that he was as well a fine art
intellect?within the limitations of the circle
by his determining obsessions.

II
Whatever we may think of the character of Kafka's vision of
life, it is surely impossible to ignore the very obvious psycho
pathic foundation of his work, its obsessive character, its narrow
limits and its reiteration of certain inescapable themes. It is clear
that Kafka's work possessed for him a primarily therapeutic func
tion, although this is in no way to denigrate the artistry with
which he was sometimes able to present his picture of life. It
was the medium through which he exteriorized his dilemmas and
thus to a certain extent obtained a control over them. It is, at
any rate, clear that he was not writing for the amusement or
edification of a public (not only the form of his work, but the
reluctance with which he permitted publication in his life-time,

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 226 FRANZ KAFKA: FAITH AND VOCATION

and posthumous instructions for the destroying of his manuscripts

support this.)
Kafka himself, in a long, hundred-page "Letter to My
Father," written in 1919, attempted, according to Max Brod,*
"to classify his entire literary work under the general heading
of 'attempt at flight from his father'."

You were the subject of my books [he writes]. In them

I poured out the sorrows that I could not pour out on your
breast. My writing has been a purposely drawn-out parting
from you. But though this parting was forced by you, its
direction was determined by me.8

This seems like an oversimplification on Kafka's part, and yet

there can be no doubt that the shadow of his successful, aggres
sive, powerful parent had an inhibiting and introverting effect
upon his timid and sensitive son, which no would-be explorer of
Kafka's mind can afford to minimize. "You are unfit for life," he
makes his father say to him, in this long letter, "but to make
things more comfortable and easy for yourself and to spare your
self any self-reproach, you prove that I have robbed you of all
your fitness for life and put it in my pocket." The manner in
which his relationship with his father had "unfitted him for life"
is shown in the same letter where Kafka speaks of his unavailing
attempt to get married.

The most important obstacle to my marriage [he writes]

is the ineradicable conviction that the support and conduct of
a family require everything that I have recognized in you,
the good and the bad together, as you organically combine
them: strength and arrogance; health and a certain immode
ration; eloquence and unwillingness to listen; self-con
fidence and contempt for the abilities of others; power over
men and an inclination to tyranny; knowledge of people
and mistrust towards most. Not to mention such unmixed
virtues as diligence, endurance, presence of mind, fearless
ness. Such are your qualities?mine by comparison seem

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 D. S. SAVAGE 227

next to nothing. Could I, thus equipped, ve

lock, when I saw that even you had to strugg
marriage and were positively deficient in you
your children? Of course I did not ask mysel
so explicity; otherwise my common sense wo
me men quite different from you (Uncle R
who had married and at least not collapsed un
?a considerable accomplishment, that w
plenty for me. But I did not ask this question
it from childhood on. I examined myself
ference to marriage, but in relation to every
matter. Everywhere you convinced me of m
both by your example and by your traini
tempted to describe it). And what was tru
with trifles could not help but apply to the g
all: marriage.8

It seems beyond question clear that Kafka's emotional nature

was frustrated and suppressed, and personal relationships made
excruciatingly difficult for him, by the overwhelming effect his
father's personality had upon him as a child. In the same letter
he writes,

My courage, decision, confidence, joy in a thing did not

endure if you were opposed to it, or if your opposition
could even be surmised; and I surmised it in almost every
thing I did. ... In your presence I developed a halting,
stuttering speech?you are an excellent speaker as long as you
are speaking of the things that interest you?but even my
halting speech was too much for you, and ultimately I stop
ped talking altogether, at first for spite, and then because
I could neither talk nor think in your presence. And since
you were my actual teacher, this affected everything in my
life.8

Like many individuals whose emotional life has been similarly

negated, Kafka imagined that his difficulties could be overcome
by self-investigation and the laborious, protracted and con

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228 FRANZ KAFKA/ FAITH AND VOCATION

scientious analysis of relationships?of which this long letter to his

father (which surely is destined to take its place in the Kafka
opus) is typical. But where the growth of emotional life has
been suppressed, there is little help in rational analyses of the
process of suppression. Nevertheless in many cases this is the
only instrument left in the hands of the emotionally-inhibited,
and indeed an intense, conscientious introspection may be one
of the consequences of a deep emotional frustration, resembling
the prisoner's minute and prolonged exploration of his prison
cell. The effect upon Kafka was to isolate him, to cut him off
from relationships with other persons, and to set him at a cease
less unravelling of his own actions and motives.
What was the "direction" of Kafka's parting from his father,
of which he speaks? It would seem that throughout his life
Kafka's desire was for a "normality" which he was unable to at
tain. According to Max Brod, who knew him perhaps better
than anyone, and who deliberately compares his situation with
that of the poet, Heinrich von Kleist?

Kafka's highest ideal is nowhere better expressed than in

Kleist's longing words: "To cultivate a field, to plant a tree,
to beget a child."3

This brings us at once to the primary orientation discoverable

within Kafka's work. In this connection, Max Brod has, in an
other place, the following remarks to make about the action of
The Castle\

K. sought a connection with the Grace of the Godhead when

he sought to root himself in the village at the foot of the
Castle: he fought for an occupation, a post in a certain
sphere of life; by his choice of a calling and by marriage
he wanted to gain inner stability, wanted as a "stranger"?
that is from an isolated position and as one different from
everybody else?to wrest for himself the thing which fell
into the ordinary man's lap as if of itself, without his striv

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 D. S. SAVAGE 229

ing for it particularly or thinking about it. D

interpretation of mine is the deep emotion w
Kafka once referred me to the anecdote w
neice mentions in her introduction to his c
The passage runs: "May not Flaubert have
in his last years that he had not chosen an ord
I could almost credit it when I think of the
wThich once burst from his lips when we were
along the Seine; we had been visiting one of
had found her in the midst of her brood of
they're in the right of it' (Ils sont dans le
meaning the honest family life of those peop

And Mr. Muir, as if in confirmation of this, s

sonal problem as follows:

The problem with which all Kafka's work

a moral and spiritual one. It is a twofold
of finding one's true vocation, one's true
it may be, in the community; and that of acti
with the will of heavenly powers. But thou
two aspects it was in his eyes a single proble
true place in the community is finally deter
secular, but by divine, law, and only whe
chance or deliberate effort, a man finds himself
appointed place, can he live as he should
slip into their place without being aware o
painfully conscious of the difficulty, the eviden
of finding any place at all; and nobody
clearly and deeply conscious of it, I think, t

Now, so far as the question of "vocation" is

important to recognize that one can, in this life,
pursue one of two courses. The first is, to ada
life, domestic, social, national, and so on, tha
and within one, to accept its values of possession
survival, to integrate oneself into its pattern, a
assured validity and entering into the conventio

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230 FRANZ KAFKA: FAITH AND VOCATION

which it provides. This was the pattern of life pursued by

Kafka's father, whose example, however, had a positively in
hibiting effect upon his son. The other course is to reject that
life, perceiving its makeshift, conventional character, in order to
live according to standards received from a relating of one's ideas
and actions to some principle of being which is ultimate and ab
solute, and therefore truly authoritative. (This is, of course, an
external statement of the position: a transposition of terms drawn
from natural existence to describe the supernatural.) In either
case one may be given a pattern of conduct, one will be given at
least the possibility of consistency, integrality and power. But
Kafka's dilemma took shape from his repudiation of the first
course and his inability to take the plunge into the second. This
dilemma in fact is central to his work. Kafka's own irresolution,
guilt-sense, timidity, and over-conscientiousness derived from
his vacillation between the two spheres of being designated
respectively "earth" and "heaven." As he himself put it, in one
of his aphorisms:

He is a free and secure citizen of the world, for he is fet

tered to a chain which is long enough to give him the free
dom of all earthly space, and yet only so long that nothing
can drag him past the frontiers of the world. But simul
taneously he is a free and secure citizen of Heaven as well,
for he is also fettered by a similarly designed heavenly
chain. So that if he heads, say, for the earth, his heavenly
collar throttles him, and if he heads for Heaven, his earthly
one does the same. And yet all the possibilities are his, and
he feels it ; more, he actually refuses to account for the dead
lock by an error in the original fettering.0

It can be seen from this how Kafka was torn between two ir
reconcilable needs or longings. He desired a place in the com
munity, which was granted to everybody else (seemingly) without
their having to struggle for divine recognition. To be like them,
if that was his desire, he had only to accept life as it came to

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 D. S. SAVAGE 231

him, and trouble no more about a divine sanction for it than

anybody else?his father, for instance?whose attitude towards
ultimates was passive. But he was psychologically incapable of
this passivity, an incorrigible passion for "rightness" made him
struggle to obtain a divine sanction for the conditions of his earthly
existence. Such a sanction could not be forthcoming. From this
point of view it might be said that K.'s error, in The Castley was
in not proceeding at once to the Castle and taking it, as it were,
by storm. Instead of doing so, however, he "obstinately insists
to the point of exhaustion on regulating his life on earth in ac
cordance with instructions from the Castle, although he is forcibly
and even brutally rebuffed by every Castle functionary."'
It is useless to speak in terms of "belief in the potentialities
of democracy and the common man" to anyone who has pro
gressed so far in disillusion as Kafka had done. It is equally
useless to make a criterion of "normality," even though normali
ty would seem to have been Kafka's overmastering desire. These
things operate on a certain level of social validity, but beyond
that level they are seen, as Kafka saw them, to lack any satis
factory justification. Kafka may be regarded as a psychopatho
logical "case" in that his abnormality made him incapable of ac
cepting the half-truths and compromises which are embodied in
human conduct on the average, social level, but it must also be
recognized that this abnormality caused him to gain a valid
insight into the illusory nature of the social contract. The answer
to such an appeal to social values is to be found in certain of
Kafka's fables, which are as valid in their application to life on a
certain level in the Republican America of the forties as they are
to the life of the Republican Germany of the twenties: in particu
lar, "The Great Wall of China" and the "City Coat of Arms,"
the point of each of which is that the once purposeful human
social system is carried on when all its original meaning has left
it. "... To this must be added that the second or third genera
tion had already recognized the senselessness of building a

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232 FRANZ KAFKA: FAITH AND VOCATION

heaven-reaching tower; but by that time everybody was too

deeply involved to leave the city."7 (It is true however that
Kafka more than suggests that the original meaning may have
been an illusion anyhow.)
Unable, then, to accept and make do with the compromises
which help most people to come to terms with their lives, Kafka
was left with the only possible alternative of committing himself
completely to the divine will. But this he could not do, as he
explains in his aphorism concerning the two chains. His attitude
towards the world leads only to confusion owing to his obsessive
insistence on regulating earthly life in accordance with the divine
laws (which are undiscovei*able). But his attitude towards the
divine leads also to a stalemate because he will not accept it for
its own sake, turning away, if need be, from the world; but insists
upon narrowing it down to fit within the confines of earthly ex
istence, attempting to bring the infinite down into the service of
the finite under the pretence of making the finite serve the in
finite. This leads only to stultification and the cancelling out of
each realm by the other. In fact, Kafka's writings give us no clue
to the real nature of the spiritual world, and to suppose that they
do so is to become the victim of Kafka's own confusions. They
merely delineate the world of his own confused wanderings, of
which all we know in it of spiritual life is the incommensurability
of the divine with the human. The action of The Castle, as of
The Trial, takes place neither in the actual nor in the spiritual
world, but in the void between, where the distorted shadows and
images of each lie thrown together in complete confusion. "There
is a goal but no way; what we call the way is only wavering."8

Ill
The dilemma, in fact, which a study of Kafka's writings r
veals as central to his existence, is the dilemma of faith. To t
"normal," average sensual man who is able to remain immers
in the conventions of his social and biological existence, the issu

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 D. S. SAVAGE 233

of faith does not arise with any pressing urgency. It arises as a

conscious and urgent question for those who have lost their faith
in the Tightness of so-called "normal" mundane actuality:

No one can say that we are wanting in faith. The mere

fact of our living is itself inexhaustible in its proof of faith.

You call that a proof of faith? But one simply cannot not
live.
In that very "simply cannot" lies the insane power of faith;
in that denial it embodies itself.

Franz Kafka, one might very well say, was in the predicament of
a man who had lost this fundamental, unconscious faith in the
Tightness of things (a loss which is a necessary prelude to a
religious conversion, an assertion of faith at a higher level) but
who was incapable of making the leap towards that higher level
in which lay his only hope of salvation and personal r?int?gration.
Instead, he oriented his life towards a stubborn, blind and pathetic
attempt at r?int?gration upon the lower level, an attempt which
was inevitably foredoomed to failure. Max Brod, again, who
speaks of The Castle as Kafka's Fausty remarks of this :

Certainly K. is a Faust in deliberately modest, even needy

trappings, and with the essential modification that he is driv
en on not by a longing for the final goals of humanity, but
by a need for the most primitive requisites of life, the need
to be rooted in a home and a calling, and to become a mem
ber of a community. At the first glance this difference seems
very great, but becomes considerably less so when one rec
ognizes that for Kafka those primitive goals have religious
significance, and are simply the right life, the right way
(Tao).1
The leap of faith, however, it is commonly recognized by religious
thinkers, requires a renunciation of a concern for this world and its
affairs. It is necessary to "hate" the world, to turn wholly to

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234 FRANZ KAFKA: FAITH AND VOCATION

the eternal realm and to centre one's life and hopes within that
realm, even if this should mean the enmity of the world and
worldly disgrace?which as a matter of fact it usually does.
Kafka could not conceive this; but that he was not altogether
unaware of the nature of the act of faith is shown by his close
familiarity with Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, a work
which, according to Brod (and significantly) Kafka "loved much,
read often, and profoundly commented on in many letters."4
The act of faith, however, is not an intellectual act. It is
a whole direction of the will, involving the abrogation of the
intellect, and it is indissolubly associated with the noumenal
realities of personality and love?which indeed, are unable to
manifest themselves on the level of unconscious, natural ex
istence and require the act of faith to bring them into being. It
is interesting to note, therefore, that in Kafka's work, just as
there is no evidence of faith, so also there is none of personality
or love. Kafka's is the abstract, colourless world of the nerves
and the brain.
I have already stated that K.'s mistake (given the symbols
"village" and "Castle") was in not proceeding at once to the
Castle, leaving the village to take care of itself. But, in truth,
in the terms of the problem which he had set himself, and given
the nature of his peculiar demands upon existence, every move
which K. could make was bound to be the wrong one. The very
opposition between "village" and "Castle" is a product of those
demands, and Kafka's symbolism is valid only as a statement of
his own curious predicament. Kafka's statement of the problem
of the relation of the human to the divine, assuming the unbridge
able gulf between the two, becomes one of authority and submis
sion?which, of course, is a purely exoteric and external approach
to the matter. The searching out of the divine will thus becomes
an intellectual problem. But when reduced to the flat, abstract
terms of the intellect the question of spiritual "authority" be
comes an absurdity? and necessarily so, because faith and love,

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 D. S. SAVAGE 235

being spiritual realities, are not reducible to th

absurdity consequent upon a reduction of a mat
faith and love to an accordance with the static term
understanding is shown nowhere more complet
Sortini episode in The Castle; and it is in conne
that Max Brod refers us to Kafka's deep inte
gaard's Fear and Trembling:

The Sortini episode is literally a parallel to

book, which starts from the fact that God req
ham what was really a crime, the sacrifice of
which uses this paradox to establish triumph
clusion that the categories of morality and reli
means identical.4

It is strange, however, that no one has comm

full significance of this episode, which, put shortl
to the limits of the Kafka universe of the fate of
consequent upon their repudiation of Christ
family are held in high esteem in the village, t
high post in the fire-brigade (or priesthood), and
when a f?te is to be held to celebrate the pres
Castle to the village of a new fire-engine (a new
a very high official who "hardly ever comes into
who, on this occasion, "took part in the cerem
over the fire-engine," apparently falls in love wit
daughter, Amalie, and "leaps over the shaft" of th
nearer to her. The following morning he sen
couched in outrageously offensive terms, biddi
to him at once, but she tears up the note and fling
senger's face. From that time on the Barnabas f
coming in any way under the direct condemnatio
authorities, from whom they can get no word
proval or forgiveness, begin to be ostracized a
the community, into which all their endeavours to

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236 FRANZ KAFKA: FAITH AND VOCATION

selves are unavailing. It is certainly true that this episode shows

well "What a gulf there is between human reason and divine
grace" (Brod),4 although in a way which Kafka can hardly have
intended. But we are misjudging Kafka if we assume that it
is his purpose merely to demonstrate the existence of such a gulf.
His is an attempt to puzzle out the meaning of the disparity
and if possible to overcome it. But because he is incapable of
that free surrender of himself and of his worldly existence in
the act of faith, and can only apply, to that which is beyond
rational understanding, the measuring-rod of the sceptical intel
ligence, he is led to reduce the depth and complexity of a spiritual
choice of destiny to the trivial and incomprehensible terms of
fire-engines and early morning messengers.
Further, it is necessary to note Kafka's emphasis in this matter
upon the worldly disgrace apparently consequent upon a spiritual
delinquency, an emphasis which presumes the identity of earthly
with spiritual benefits. Yet the lesson, to the religious under
standing, of the coming of Christ (translated in Kafka's symbol
ism to the presence of Sortini at the f?te) is that the spiritual
wTorld is our world turned upside down, with all its values re
versed. Kafka's emphasis upon Sortini's "authority" and Amalie's
disobedience is also characteristic and characteristically beside the
point.
The endeavour to bring the sceptical intelligence to bear upon
the problems of the spiritual life can only result in the dissolu
tion of spiritual reality. To ask, sceptically and analytically,
"What is personality?" or "What is love?" or even "What is
truth?" and to analyse your findings recurrently back is to reach
a point where these realities disintegrate into pieces, leading the
enquirer into a dismembered, fragmentary, mechanistic world.
The further back into the spiritual life you try to push the
analytical method, the further the object of your investigation
disintegrates, the more hallucinatory the world in which you
discover yourself. This is so simply because spirit is not sub

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 D. S. SAVAGE 237

stance but, rather, motion, and the spiritual lif

is dynamically and "subjectively" created. The
mic faith in Kafka's world accounts for the abse
and love.
How these aspects of Kafka are related to his spiritual im
potence (for it is no less) is. to be seen from certain very marked
features of the world into which his writings conduct us. First
of all, it is necessary to remark the atmosphere of isolation in
which the action of each of the novels and tales takes place. This
action centres around one individual and one alone and he is a
patent representation of Kafka himself. It is solely his own ob
sessions which preoccupy him; other human beings enter the
scene only in a subordinate relationship to the isolated hero,
whose relationship with them is never one of equality, of personal
communion. His interest in them is chiefly as means to an end:
can they be used to subserve his overriding purpose to secure his
acquittal from the Court or to obtain for his activities the ac
knowledgment and sanction of the Castle authorities? This is a
solipsistic universe! It is appropriate, therefore, that K., himself,
in The Trial and The Castle is singularly deficient in every per
sonal quality, remaining little more than a cipher, and given a
character only by the compulsive nature of his quest: a moving
anxiety, a human question mark of guilt and impatience.
It is particularly noticeable how, with each succeeding work,
this atmosphere of isolation increases. In America, the least
characteristic of the novels, there is some degree of average hu
man equality among the characters, and Karl Rossman, a portrayal
of natural innocence, and not of guilt, is not yet quite the cipher,
K., while the social scene is given some attention for its own
sake. The progression of the novels and tales is as follows:
In America there is an acceptance of "normality," with a play
upon an optimistic naturalism. In The Trial normal, everyday
life is menaced and undermined by the enigmatic forces of the
supernatural which pursue the individual with a sense of out

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238 FRANZ KAFKA: FAITH AND VOCATION

raged guilt. In The Castle the supernatural authority has been

accepted unquestioningly, and the problem is of "advancing to
the attack" in quest of its sanctions. But these are never
achieved. The last stories represent a relapse to a hopeless con
dition of defeated, though whimsical, apathy.
In The Trial we are in the metropolis, although it is a metro
polis whose reality is cast into doubt by the enigmatic presence
in its midst of the Court with its mysterious ramifications. But
the characters to whom we are introduced?K.'s landlady, K.'s
uncle, Fr?ulein Burstner?have an aspect of solidity, as have the
circumstances of K.'s existence, the Bank, his lodgings, the Cathe
dral. In The Castle all that is changed and we are in the rarified
and spectral atmosphere of a feudal village high up on the moun
tains in winter. The sense of isolation is finely suggested by
the pervading cold, the snow, the strangeness of everything and
the remoteness of the Castle high up overhead, sometimes visible,
sometimes obscured from view by mist and clouds. It is a world
in which the isolation of personality draws it to the verge of un
reality. Fantasy predominates over realism. And in the later
stories, where isolation is carried to its conclusion, and the prob
lem is no longer that of relating human effort to divine law (the
attempt having been abandoned as hopeless), dehumanization
results, and the problems (as in "The Burrow" and "Investiga
tions of a Dog") are those, not of men, but of animals.
There seems little need to pursue this analysis of Kafka ex
haustively into these last stories-?that is, the tales contained in
the collection entitled The Great Wall of China. It is enough
to remark that here we are confronted with the same preoccupa
tions as have tortured Kafka throughout his writings?the prob
lems of guilt and original sin, of a mysterious and inscrutable
authority; with their overtones of anxiety and persecution. In
"Investigations of a Dog," Kafka's own search for the divine is
pathetically parodied, the apparent moral being that it is as
absurd for a dog to attempt to comprehend the rules which

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 D. S. SAVAGE 239

govern the behaviour of its invisible masters as i

being to seek to scrutinize the divine forces w
destiny. "The Burrow," "... a description," acco
Muir, "of the shifts to which man is reduced
and the fatal imperfection of his most astute dev
Kafka's personal situation in its last extremity. B
with its ingenious passages and its central Castle K
its maker's "stores," is not only a parable of in
self-love. It is also Kafka's symbol for his intel
his writings, which have been a painful but absorb
which he has been able to forget his "enemy"?f
or the reality beyond death?in preparing the
fuge against him : battering the walls of the Castl
his head and cementing the sand with the blood
Yet nothing can really protect him from the
when at last this mysterious being is in prospec
can only reprove himself for his failure to take st
complicated, precautions against the attacker:

Not the slightest attempt have I made to c

a plan, nothing at all has been done in this dir
been as thoughtless as a child, I have passed
years in childish games, I have done nothing
with the thought of danger, I have shirked
thought for actual danger. And there has b
warning.8

Or, to take the opening sentence from "Investigations of

a Dog,"
How much my life has changed, and yet how unchanged
it has remained at bottom!

To conclude, a merely aesthetic approach to Kafka is bound

to lead to an illusory estimate of his work, unless it is based upon
some such apprehension of the total pattern of his writings as

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240 FRANZ KAFKA: FAITH AND VOCATION

I have here attempted to display. For Kafka was not primarily an

"artist"?who is??but an explorer of the human condition, and
the character of his work must be related to the compulsions of
his questioning mind. Kafka himself is the sole subject of his
work, and it was certainly of no one but himself that Kafka
wrote:

A certain heaviness, a feeling of being secured against every

vicissitude, the vague assurance of a bed prepared for him
and belonging to him alone, keeps him from getting up;
but he is kept from lying still by an unrest which drives
him from his bed, by his conscience, the endless beating of
his heart, the fear of death and the longing to refute it: all
this will not let him rest and he gets up again. This up and
down and a few fortuitous, desultory, irrelevant observations
made in the course of it, are his life.0

And, again:

The bony structure of his own forehead blocks his way;

he batters himself bloody against his own forehead/
FOOTNOTES
aEdwin Berry Burgum: "Kafka and the Bankruptcy of Faith." Accent, Vol. 3, No. 3.
aEdwin Muir. "Introductory Note" to The Castle.
*Max Brod. "Kafka: Father and Son." Partisan Review, Vol. 4, No. 6.
4Max Brod. "Additional Note" to The Castle.
6Edwin Muir. "Introductory Note" to The Great Wall of China.
Kafka. The Great Wall of China. "Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope and the True
Way."
TCafka. ibid. "The City Coat of Arms."
8Kafka. ibid. "The Burrow."
9Kafka. ibid. "He."

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