But the most beautiful thing about my burrow is its stillness.
--Kafka, "The Burrow"

Kafka's fiction delves into the significance of life at its most physically and psychologically intimate levels. In texts such as "Hullabaloo," "The Judgment," and "The Metamorphosis," Kafka's heroes wander through places that do not belong to them and that they do not understand. They are lost in a world where distance and proximity have no relevance.

"The Burrow," one of Kafka's last short stories, is the monologue of a paranoid mole describing his burrow with disturbing realism: the exhausting conquest of one's own home ultimately betrays the impossibility of ever really living at peace. The tortuous connection between the mole and its burrow resembles Kafka's struggle with his work and with finding his place in the world. Kafka cannot live with himself, cannot live anywhere. The mole-writer can use only his claws, snout, and the strength of his forehead to show us an architecture created out of fear.

"Hullabaloo."

In this short story, Kafka gives a detailed description of the noise pollution that he suffered at his parents' house: "I hear all the doors close, because of their noise only the footsteps of those running between them are spared me, I hear even the slamming of the oven door in the kitchen." In such an atmosphere, he could only write with "a constant trembling on my forehead." Everything in the house was din, from his father's dragging dressing gown to the more delicate, but no less hopeless, singing of the canaries.

"The Metamorphosis."

Gregor Samsa, an ordinary commercial traveler, woke up one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect- thereby undergoing the most famous regression in modern literature. This representation of dislocation is set within the four walls of a room to which Gregor's family lays siege. There has been much speculation about the kind of insect he becomes; some have suggested a bedbug, a centipede, and a wood louse. Novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov imagined a brown convex beetle the size of a dog. Kafka was horrified at the idea of having his creature illustrated. His instructions to Ottomar Starke, who designed the cover of the first edition, were precise: "The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance."

"The Judgment."

This short story was written on the night of September 22, 1912, in eight hours of work. Kafka called the event a "complete liberation": it was the first time he had been able to write as he had dreamed of doing. "The Judgment" is generally considered to be a turning point in his life and writing, yet Kafka was aware that there was nothing new about the story's subject- the conflict between father and son. As his friend Gustav Janouch said: "The son's rebellion against his father is an old theme in literature, but an even older one in the real world."

Kafka's bestiary.

An ape who tries to explain to academics that their condition means that "everyone on earth feels a tickling of the heels." A dog is concerned with an unknown science that places freedom above all else. A cat has a lamb's soul. Vultures and sirens reinvent their origins. A giant mole. A singing mouse. Bucephalus, Alexander's horse, turns into a lawyer. In the City of K., men become animals and animals aspire to understanding the laws of human beings. Kafka's bestiary has led to many different interpretations. His choice of animals is not coincidental. Each one is a mirror of the darkest corners of the labyrinth.