Letter to His Father: Franz Kafka’s Traumatic Experience with His Father as a Child Led to Kafka’s Confused Development.

Derrick Johnson English 1020 Mrs. Halpin 10 September 2008 Letter to His Father: Franz Kafka’s traumatic experience with his father as a child led to Kafka’s confused development. Say one of your earliest memories as a young child was that of your father answering your most basic pleas with what you thought was the most horrific punishment of your life. Well this is similar to what happened to Franz Kafka when he asked for water early in the morning as a young child, partly because he was thirsty and partly to amuse himself as most children do when they want to receive attention from their parents. To control this incident his father proceeded to take the young Franz out of bed and placed him outside on the pavlatche and left him there that night. According to Kafka “…it did me inner harm.” which would lead Kafka to never fully connect why such a menial task of asking for water would suffer the outrageous reprimand of being left alone, outside at the middle of the night as a young child. This would create a certain message to Franz that his father was the ultimate righteousness, so to him all the things that made his father right, were the things he could not compete with because of his age, which would lead to his belief that he was the ultimate wrong. Franz Kafka describes his father as a “True Kafka” in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, knowledge of human nature, a certain way of doing things on a grand scale, along with his hot temper. These are things that a young child would not be able to compete with at the time. This would lead to constant criticism by his father and lead Kafka to never feel that he was adequate enough to be his fathers equal, which he was not because no child under ten has the appetite of their 30 year old father. Most of the time Franz spent with his father was at the dinner table. This would lead to the most distinguished internal battles