Kafka's Worlds

Abstract

Scholars of Franz Kafka's literary works, going back to Walter Benjamin, have often claimed that these works resist or call into question critics' attempts to produce definitive interpretations of them. Taking this point to heart, this essay argues for an approach to Kafka's works that does not seek to decode hidden messages in them through critical interpretation, but rather views them as experiments in world building and attempts to analyze the unique literary worlds each of them constructs. In order to draw the distinctions between Kafka's worlds into focus, the essay outlines three parameters that can help to define a literary world—the autonomy of its individual characters, the relativity of space and time in the characters' physical environment, and the closure or openness of the spaces the characters traverse—and shows how the worlds of Kafka's works vary along these parameters.