Do you think that Kafka's father actually was as ruthless and tough as he described...

Do you think that Kafka's father actually was as ruthless and tough as he described? Or do you think that Kafka simply was an overly sensitive boy? Personally I tend to think that his father was an asshole, but I can't come to a conclusion because I don't have enough life experience to judge how a man should treat his children.

He wasn't a monster or anything, but Kafka clearly felt alienated and confused by his father's lack of understanding.

>Kafka describes his dad as "a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, [and] knowledge of human nature"
>Kafka's protagonists are all betas

>Kafka's father was a professional slaughterer
>Kafka became a vegetarian

Just sayin

I ready an biography on him recently, but only one, so it's all I have to go on.

It seemed like he created the alienation with his father intentionally. A lot of his life seems to be self-imposed torment which he used as a tool in his writing.

Also his father exerted a lot of pressure on him re: working, having a family, being a man, etc., but a lot of that pressure was subtle.

>Kafka's father was a professional slaughterer

His grandfather. His father was a retailer.

Slaughtering sales like a boss. Kafka Snr. straight up murdered those annual income targets.

Look at how Kaczynski described his parents vs. how they really were.

I could imagine it was somewhat similar with Kafka.

What about dragging him out to the balcony and leaving him there all night in the cold when he was a child? What about other weird stuff his father said and did? Like Franz giving a book to his father that he wrote and dedicated to him, and his father only replying almost without any attention to him: "Lay it on the nightstand." His father also exerted power over the household and Kafka's mother.

Yes Kafka was obviously a very vulnerable person, but that does not justify his father's behaviour to him (even if he isn't the monster Kafka makes him out to be), especially considering his feelings of utter despair, fear and depression.

Sensitive narcissists always tend to embellish their own biographical narratives and those of others.

Breece D'J Pancake told everyone he was some sort of hillbilly raised on roadkill and moonshine, but in reality his parents were middle-class, albeit West Virginians.

DFW had a library stocked with self-help books about mothers who push their children to be geniuses etc, while in reality his grades were mediocre throughout childhood and he only got into Amherst because his father was alumnus.

Houellebecq claims at the end of Submission that he has never attended university, even though in reality he attended agricultural college and then film school for several years.

Or Jack London the rugged working class nature writer, who only spent one winter in Alaska before returning to California and making a career out of writing about the place.

Think of all the writers who describe themselves as having been super poor while writing their novel, who in reality were actually pretty comfy. Gareth Risk Halberg is a recent example, as he described himself in a national newspaper interview as being a "pure outsider", even though his parents were academics, he has lived his life in academia, and so on.

Writers know how to manipulate readers into thinking a certain way, and they know what sounds romantic, aesthetic and so on, so it's understandable if regrettable that so many apply their ability to write fiction to their own lives. I for example spend most of my free time edging, eating shitty food and candy, walking around alone or watching stupid videos on youtube, but I know that it is far more appealing if I portray myself as an isolated genius who spends his spare time outside of his dreary office job furiously writing and reading and expanding his already enviable intelligence. Right now I'm lying in bed wearing boxer shorts pulled up so as to make me feel like a girl with a thong-wedgie, rubbing my thighs together and semi-ironically thinking about "boys" in a homoerotic fashion. Do I know any "boys"? No. Am I even female? No. Homosexual? Not really. Just bored and lonely and pathetic. Not a single mention of this will make it to my memoir, despite its inevitable length and detail. Thanks for reading, really.

>semi-ironically

I found another fabrication in your biography.

this is pathetic

Bruh look at dis duuuuude

is this the new sincerity dfw warned us about?

I appreciate that user.

Get the fuck out.

Seriously, get out. You don't seem to realize how Veeky Forums used to be great, before beasts like you ruined it. Now the mods side with the mediocre, with the rabble, with you ; they will ban anyone telling your kind to get the fuck out. They helped make this place more like reddit ; and it just keeps getting worse, as reddit users come, and just see the garbage, the retarded shit, the dumb sci-fi, fantasy, pleb threads, and go "woah this board is actually quite like reddit but with another template," so we have to deal with them, and they start to form sort of gangs, and will side against anything rare or noble to further wallow in their mediocrity like an animal in its shit. Most of them must be fat fucks, gamers and losers.
Some of them can be reared into respectable people, but they must encounter anons with unfathomable arrogance backed up by true knowledge of the subject matter. The good ones will feel terrible about themselves, and will remake themselves. They will read the good books, they will despise their former selves, and attempt to create a new personality, bringing about their maturity.
The others are just too low-blood to make it, probably the descendants of products of incest or the sludge of some peasant caste in a past age, the kind with big foreheads and squinted faces, who hunker through the streets and yell at anyone they deem "tryhard" or "hipster," words true for some but used falsely by them against anything or anyone remotely Olympian. These must be simply embarrassed with ad hominems, doxes, literary gang rape and dunce caps until they get the fuck out for good. That's all they can understand, so we speak their language.

Since we stopped doing this like we used to, the board now lacks the atmosphere of an old e/lit/e french salon fused with the violent Greek ἀγών which it once possessed.

We don't have experts to come in and shit on newplebs, tell them to go back to reading catcher in the rye: we've let people who fap off to DFW actually have threads and not shame them out of here, and the American election has made everyone care about petty politics more than the canon, so you get effete antifa wannabees and braindead alt-right meme-spouters bickering about who is more sophisticated when neither of them read anything written prior to the nineteenth century.

If we want the board to be good we have to shit on people all the time and cultivate a culture of elitism again.

In order to achieve this, we must make the reddit users feel not welcome, and ruin their chances at an actual discussion of whatever their mediocrity brought them to enjoy. They must lose all incentive to come here. This incentive is fundamentally that they find a platform which allows to partake in such discussion. This platform must be destroyed ; we must insult, humiliate and harass them until they can no longer find any pleasure in coming here.

mamma mia this pasta is big

NO NO NO NO

probably the greatest post on lit ive ever seen after 2.5 yrs of this board

He looks like eraser head

Did you know this guy went on to playing bass in the popular progressive hard rock band Rush?

Did you post Geddy cause he's jewish

Both, desu. A deep misunderstanding probably developed between the two because of how different they were. That being said, Kafka's father pulled shit locking Kafka out of the house because he asked for a drink when he was a child.

>embellish

What if they really experienced it that way? And don't say that that would make it "not real", if you claim that, you're about 250 years behind on philosophy and literature

Yes, his dad was an asshole.

>muh feelings

250 shitty years.

Never this truth was told before.

I agree with you (you forgot to mention Thoreau, too, who's staying in the wilderness to write Walden was surprisingly tame, with his mother doing his laundry and not being that far from civilization IIRC), but to be fair, this is just something almost everyone does. Subjectively, our own (most psychological) suffering (as long as it's not so great as to be obvious) is almost always worse to ourselves than it seems to other people, and people are almost always looking for sympathy.

Also that's a gay ending, stop deprecating yourself

>agricultural college and then film school
That's not the same as uni, dumb smelly *nglo