ABSTRACT
Kafka is a writer of no account who simply caters to the emotions of helplessness and self-contempt characteristic of the faineant intellectuals of his time. Kafka's seems an anti-historical tale, describing the opposite of what actually occurred. Kafka obeys Kierkegaard's imperative to kill hope; but he does not follow him in his leap of Faith, that act of philosophical suicide denounced by Camus. The exasperation is surely not confined to the Officer and the worthlessness of works in contributing to salvation is a recurring theme in Kafka's writing. Kafka can be seen as an important member of a tradition that includes Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, all of them thinkers who repudiate what they see as the shallow optimism that controls the conception of human destiny at the retarded aesthetic stage. In Kafka, the flesh is to be made words in a sacrifice that turns out to be without meaning or redemption, in flat rebuttal of the zealot's promise.
