Kafka's literature is one of the many intellectual projects underway in the European fin-de-siècle. It is the work of a young man in search of a meaning for being there, despite his bureaucratic work at a government agency. His literature is an attempt to get a hold of a society that sometimes accepts him and sometimes rejects him, for his Jewish background. A background usually not considered by him and his fellows, but always present in many different ways. It is this background that gives way to his literary production and, thus, his own life. This paper is an attempt to read the Jewish background that is behind Kafka's work, a background always present, which works in favor of his production, not as a Muse, but as anguish and the necessity to write.
Franz Kafka; literatures; subjectivity