Kafka was a master of the enigmatic. In his book, Everyone's Darling: Kafka and the Critics of His Short Fiction, Franz R. Kempf states that, "Kafka critics only agree on one thing, and that is that they are not in agreement." Kempf points out that Kafka valued this resistance in his work to specific interpretations, as he "understood writing to be a consciously created ambiguity." Walter Benjamin has even asserted that Kafka "took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings." Even Kafka himself, Kempf explains, "found his work to be incomprehensible."

Yet, while Kafka's work resists definitive interpretation, there has been no end to the critical material written about Kafka and his work. In his book Introducing Kafka, David Zane Mairowitz claims that, "no writer of our time, and probably none since Shakespeare, has been so widely overinterpreted and pigeonholed." Kafka's work, interpreted and over-interpreted...