A messenger in one of his stories travels through one antechamber after another without ever reaching the person to whom his message is addressed. Not only are Kafka’s fictions incomplete many of them also contain meditations on the impossibility of completion. Kafka finished none of the three novels he started, and his final attempt, “ The Castle,” leaves off abruptly midsentence. Most of his work was published posthumously, through the efforts of his best friend, Max Brod, and much of it still bears the marks of its author’s uncertainty. Franz Kafka’s fitful fiction provides a reminder. By the time a book is bound and printed, it is easy to forget that the words were once in motion. Literature usually reaches us in its finished form, when it has already ossified into irrevocability.
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