The sweeping nature of the hunger artist's abstention is made plain by the opposing symbol of the panther who replaces him in his cage: "the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it." In 1920 Milena Jesenska wrote to Brod: "Frank cannot live. Frank does not have the capacity for living. . . He is absolutely incapable of living, just as he is incapable of getting drunk. He possesses not the slightest refuge. For that reason he is exposed to all those things against which we are protected. He is like a naked man among a multitude who are dressed." After Gregor Samsa's incarnation, Kafka showed a fondness for naked heroes — animals who have complicated and even pedantic confessions to make but who also are distinguished by some keenly observed bestial traits — the ape of "A Report to an Academy" befouls himself and his fur jumps with fleas; the dog of "Investigations" recalls his young days when, very puppylike, "I believed that great things were going on around me of which I was the leader and to which I must lend my voice, things which must be wretchedly thrown aside if I did not run for them and wag my tail for them"; the mouse folk of "Josephine the Singer" pipe and multiply and are pervaded by an "unexpended, ineradicable childishness"; and the untaxonomic inhabitant of "The Burrow" represents the animal in all of us, his cheerful consumption of "small fry" existentially yoked to a terror of being consumed himself. An uncanny empathy broods above these zoomorphs, and invests them with more of their creator's soul than all but a few human characters receive. So a child, cowed and bored by the world of human adults, makes companions of pets and toy animals.

Kafka, in the long "Letter to His Father," which he poured out in November 1919 but that his mother prudently declined to deliver, left a vivid picture of himself as a child, "a little skeleton," undressing with his father in a bathing hut. "There was I, skinny, weakly, slight; you strong, tall, broad. Even inside the hut I felt a miserable specimen, and what's more, not only in your eyes but in the eyes of the whole world, for you were for me the measure of all things." Hermann Kafka — "the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority" — was a butcher's son from a village in southern Bohemia; he came to Prague and founded a successful business, a clothing warehouse selling wholesale to retailers in country towns. He was physically big, as were all the Kafkas (Franz himself grew to be nearly six feet*), and a photograph of 1910 shows more than a touch of arrogance on his heavy features. No doubt he was sometimes brusque with his sensitive only son, and indifferent to the boy's literary aspirations. But Hermann Kafka cannot be blamed for having become in his son's mind and art a myth, a core of overwhelming vitality and of unappeasable authority in relation to which one is hopelessly and forever in the wrong. It is Franz Kafka's extrapolations from his experience of paternal authority and naysaying, above all in his novels The Trial and The Castle, that define the word "Kafkaesque." Like "Orwellian," the adjective describes not the author but an atmosphere within a portion of his work. Kafka's reputation has been immeasurably enhanced by his seeming prophecy, in works so private and eccentric, of the atrocious regimes of Hitler and Stalin, with their mad assignments of guilt and farcical trials and institutionalized paranoia. But the seeds of such vast evil were present in the world of the Emperor Franz Josef, and Kafka was, we should not forget, a man of the world, for all his debilities. He attended the harsh German schools of Prague; he earned the degree of Doctor of Law; he had experience of merchandising through his father's business. He worked thirteen years for the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia — his speciality was factory safety, and his reports were admired, trusted, and published in professional journals. He retired as Senior Secretary, and a medal of honor "commemorating his contribution to the establishment and management of hospitals and rest homes for mentally ill veterans" was on its way to him as the Hapsburg Empire collapsed in 1918. Out of his experience of paternal tyranny and decadent bureaucracy he projected nightmares that proved prophetic. A youthful disciple. Gustav Janouch, who composed the hagiographic Conversations with Kafka, once raised with him the possibility that his work was "a mirror of tomorrow." Kafka reportedly covered his eyes with his hands and rocked back and forth, saying, "You are right. You are certainly right. Probably that's why I can't finish anything. I am afraid of the truth. . . One must be silent, if one can't give any help.