The book, which may be considered a Bildungsroman, or novel of education (in the tradition of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister), recounts the adventures of Karl Rossmann, who, banished by his father because he was seduced by a servant girl, emigrates to America. The first of them, begun in 1912 and originally referred to by Kafka as Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared), was published in 1927 under the title Amerika. Kafka's three great novel fragments, Amerika, Der Prozes (The Trial), and Das Schloss (The Castle), might have been lost to the world altogether had it not been for the courage of Max Brod, who edited them posthumously, ignoring his friend's request to destroy all of his unpublished manuscripts. There follows a detailed analysis of the relationship between father and son, essentially a short autobiography, emphasizing the years of his childhood. One of Kafka's most important writings is the 100-page letter to his father, written in November 1919 as an attempt to clarify his conscience before his father and to assert his final independence of the latter's authority. Ein Hungerkünstler became the title story for the last book published during the author's lifetime, a collection of four delicate stories that appeared in 1923. Again, as in Die Verwandlung, it is the outsiders, however sensitive and gifted, who succumb, whereas the healthy realists survive in the struggle for existence. The stories written during the war years, from 1916 to 1918, were published in 1919 in a collection dedicated to his father and entitled Der Landarzt (The Country Doctor), and the following year, in October, Die neue Rundschau published his story Ein Hungerkünstler (The Hunger Artist). In spite of this literary output, Kafka maintained his position in Prague until the end of 1917, when he found that he had tuberculosis. One of Kafka's most frightening stories is the novella In der Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony), written in 1914. By means of an unerhörte Begebenheit (outrageous event), Kafka creates for his reader a world of psychotic delusion which his narrative art preserves as a reality in its own right. The year 1913 saw the publication of Kafka's best-known story about the man degraded to an animal, Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). Kafka's next work, completed in May 1913, was the story Der Heizer (The Stoker), later incorporated in his fragmentary novel Amerika and awarded in 1915 the Fontane Prize, his first public recognition. In this story Kafka successfully blends the disparate aspects of his writing - fantasy, realism, speculation, and psychological insight - into a new unity.
The judgment is passed by a bedridden, authoritarian father on his conscientious but guilt-haunted son, who obediently commits suicide. The story contains all the elements normally associated with Kafka's world, the most disorderly universe ever presented by a major artist. In September 1912 Kafka composed in a single sitting, on the night of September 22/23, the story Das Urteil (The Verdict), dedicated to his future fiancée, Felice, and published the following year in Brod's annual, Arcadia. B.," that is, Max Brod, who had been his closest friend since their first meeting as university students in 1902. Preoccupied with problems of reality and appearance, they reveal his objective realism based on urban middle-class life. These sketches are polished, light impressions based on observation of life in and around Prague. Kafka's first collection of stories was published in 1913 under the title Betrachtung (Contemplation). In 1909 these two pieces were published by Franz Blei in his journal, Hyperion. Here he came to know the suffering of the underprivileged workmen and wrote his first published work, "Conversation with a Beggar" and "Conversation with a Drunkard," two sections from Die Beschreibung eines Kampfes (Description of a Struggle). In early 1908 he joined the staff of the Workmen's Compensation Division of the Austrian government, in a semi-governmental post which he held until his retirement for reasons of ill health in July 1922. In October 1906 Kafka started to practice at the criminal court and later at the civil court in Prague, while serving as an interne in the office of an attorney in order to gain some practical experience.
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