Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

W. H. Auden referred to Kafka as the Dante of the modern age. If he did not solely intend to say that Kafka’s work narrates a journey through hell, he also meant that Kafka sums up—but in concrete images rather than axioms and scholia—modernity’s art and thought. Hence critics’ easy recourse to finding in his fiction crystallizations of Kierkegaard, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, just as Dante is supposed to be Aquinas versified. To say this, however, is to denude Kafka of his strangeness.