3). This second piece of information not only contradicts the first, it turns the parable on its head—why would someone, especially “you,” which seems to refer to the reader, dream up something so unnecessarily complicated, especially when it concerns something as momentous as an emperor’s message? This “you” can stand for Kafka himself—a writer who saw an infinite corkscrew of obstacles spiraling before him, and yet felt compelled to record his own deliberate steps. “Before the Law” also features an Inferno-like layering and again pits an unsophisticated character against an implacable system, unknowable in its complexity. Though the man from the country never recognizes it, his defeat by the Law, capital L, is a foregone conclusion. The Law’s only purpose is to shut out the man and, in so doing, to destroy him.

Kafka’s parables are epitomes of his larger works (“Before the Law,” though published first on its own, is actually part of The Trial). Their shortness only concentrates the reader’s perplexity. Robert Wenniger claims that Kafka’s father engendered in Kafka a disparity between language and meaning. In fact, silence was Kafka’s typical response to his father. By writing incomprehensible texts, Wenniger argues, Kafka assumes the role of the father, an authorial position over the reader (Wenniger, “Sounding Out the Silence of Gregor Samsa: Kafka’s Rhetoric of Dyscommunication”). This leaves the reader confused and vainly searching for meaning. Of course, Kafka shares this privilege with many of the world’s great writers, whose work is often a challenge to interpret. In “On Parables” Kafka writes, “Parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already” (The Complete Stories, 1971, p. 457).

In Kafka’s formulation, the parable is used by the sage to gesture toward something larger than, or invisible to, himself. The need to make this gesture is innate. But the parable dissolves the moment we understand it; the gesture would not be beyond language if it could be defined. We lose in parable the moment we pin things down to an accessible meaning. Realizing it is impossible to discuss or interpret Kafka without losing in parable is the first and perhaps only step we can take.

Kafka’s parables not only fall apart once we interpret them, they are impossible to put into practice. If anything, his parables guarantee the failure not only of his characters, but of readers wishing to abstract any lessons applicable to their own lives. Failure, it seems, is Kafka’s true subject. To get at this conundrum, we must explore discretely the dichotomies Kafka himself con flates—dreams versus reality, idleness versus work, vermin versus human, child versus adult. For Kafka, each of these antagonistic pairs represents an authorial relationship. It is possible to lump the lowly—dreams, idleness, vermin, child—on one side, and the authority figures—reality, work, human, adult—on the other. But ultimately this equation is too simple, for Kafka himself fails to pick a side. He calls both sides into question and finds them equally detestable. Unbraiding Kafka’s authorial relationships is the only way to find out why.

Dreams—and, perhaps more importantly, nightmares—held a singular influence over Kafka and his writing. Kafka’s nightmares are so natural, so convincing, that they creep into the reader’s mind almost subliminally. He metamorphoses reality into a new, insidiously darker one, often within a single sentence. In “The Judgment,” Georg’s father throws at him an old, unfamiliar newspaper (p. 64), an actual object that evidences a deception, staggering in its elaborateness—Georg’s father has been feigning his infirmity, only pretending to read his newspapers, for years! In “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka speeds time ticklessly: “It was half past six and the hands were steadily advancing, actually past the half hour and already closer to three quarters past” (p. 8).