Franz Kafka: The rebellion against the Bildungsroman

Abstract

Kafka’s famous phrase “My life is literature” is more wishful thinking than reality, for much of his letters and diaries show that this was not the case. Literature was more of an escape, an exhausting and often unsuccessful attempt to save himself from the life he was facing. If we assume that the Bildungsroman is one of the best-known literary forms in which life becomes literature and literature appears as life, it is not surprising that we can interpret Kafka’s narrative, both in his fragmentary novels and in his short stories, as a confrontation and, moreover, as a rebellion against the writing of the Bildungsroman, both in its themes and motifs and in its literary form. Education and formation (Bildung) have become problematic not only in Kafka’s individual life, but more generally as the basis of a bourgeois society whose ethical and metaphysical beliefs and social practices have become deeply questionable. This article therefore proposes to read Kafka’s narrative as a rebellion, a rebellion against the Bildungsroman.