Franz Kafka and the Absurd Universe
Franz Kafka and the Absurd Universe

Summary/Abstract: The novel of the twentieth century is characterized by an autonomy of forms, tending to become an autonomous genre. The new novel refuses conventions, that is, the coherent rendering of life, preferring, instead, the demonstration of the artificial. The modern novel no longer follows the methodical analysis of souls, but seeks the inner disorder, the secret of the character’s existence. The novel of the twentieth century thus becomes an epic of consciousness. Unlike Joyce, whose novel becomes esoteric, Kafka becomes the founder of an absurd novel. In Kafka’s novel, the meaning is suspended in a world that is unable to understand and promote true ideals and values. Franz Kafka represents for the 20th century literature a point of reference, that of the introduction of the myth of anguish and of the absurd in the realm of universal literature. Kafka’s work seems to concentrate, in a unitary whole, the most important tendencies of the new novel.

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