Franz Kafka is indeed a familiar name with book lovers around the world. Despite his short life of only 40 years, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in 20th-century literature and culture, exactly like the critics always said: “Before Kafka, there was none. After Kafka, there are thousands”. Nevertheless, Kafka was no different from any other great man in history, only getting recognized years after his death. For his whole life, Kafka believed he was nothing but a small, weak, useless being, and had never, or could ever, hold any significance. This belief might have directly led to his miserable view of the world, a place where everyone was nothing but a tiny drop in the ocean that carried a sin from birth and must spend the whole life to atone, and for that they always got stuck on continual ridiculously tragic situations where they could never struggle through.

His three most famous novels, The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle, are examples for his pessimistic view: Gregor Samsa woke up from a morning like any other— only to realize he had turned into a vermin; Joseph K. got to his sense by the loud noises from the agents who announced he was arrested for being accused of a crime; K. arrived at a nameless village and tried to enter a nameless castle. Kafka let his readers wander into a world of vagueness and absurdity, with an unknown type of insect; unknown law executors from unknown departments and an unknown crime; an unknown village and an unknown castle. Every protagonist in his novels was all put in a ridiculously weird situation, where they had to go through an unnecessarily complex process, trying to achieve something seemingly unreachable, and being gradually isolated throughout their helpless circumstances until they faced a dead-end, or their deaths finally came.

Yet it is rather his short stories that can perfectly capture his style. In Poseidon, the god, despite being the most powerful in the atlantic ocean, could neither finish his piles of paperwork nor have a chance to explore his own vast underwater domain. The joke is that not even a god could handle the amount of work demanded, and it was because he deemed all his servants unworthy that he never delegated any of his work to them. Or in an even shorter story of his, a five-sentence long named A Little Fable, it started with a mouse complaining to a cat of how the walls oddly started to narrow down until the mouse could not run anymore and got in a trap, and finally got eaten by the cat once finishing. It is not hard to see that regardless the stories’ length, all of Kafka’s characters were always caught up in nightmarish, oppressive situations, especially within an unreasonably illogical bureaucratic system, where they had to face surreal obstacles and no matter what they did, they could never seem to escape but fall deeper into the helplessness and face death sooner or later.

However, despite today’s recognition towards Kafka as an author alongside a human himself, it has never been easy to pick up Kafka’s stories. Without the most important elements of fictions including rising and falling actions, and climax, he broke the traditional five-act or three-act structure and brought to his readers nothing but plain, even innocuous stories. The world of literature is foremost a world of imagination, and what literature shows are countless unexpected possibilities; it is the joy and thrill that people seek from the dramas within fiction, or it is actually an escape that they want, a break from their repetitive, boring daily life. Thus, what they find in the so-called “fiction” of Kafka is undoubtedly dull yet somehow horrific; because it is usually the worst possible, not about the events or the plots but the spitting images of themselves in the characters, who are always running on a never-ending cycle and having to bear such a cruel, painful system. In his writings, there are no knots to be untied, no heroes to be put on the pedestal and without the dramas, Kafka still created the most dreadful journey to his audience, making them stop to face themselves and ponder upon their existence: who are they, and what makes their life meaningful if everything inevitably ends some day?

Therefore, Kafka’s impact is even more significant until the contemporary era, when everyone seems to have lost themselves in the crowds and the hustling pace of life. Though his stories are undeniably neither the most comfortable nor interesting pieces, the question on existence arising as people emerge themselves into his literary world has also given them a possibility that they might never think of: instead of experiencing an exciting journey with continuous thrills, they may have even just a few minutes to look deep into themselves and contemplate the true meaning of their lives, of what to do when it all turns into dust one day.