Many of Kafka's fables contain an inscrutable, baffling mixture of the normal and the fantastic, though occasionally the strangeness may be understood as the outcome of a literary or verbal device, as when the delusions of a pathological state are given the status of reality, or the metaphor of a common figure of speech is taken literally. Thus, in The Judgment, a son unquestioningly commits suicide at the behest of his aged father. In The Metamorphosis the son wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous and repulsive insect; he slowly dies, not only because of his family's shame and its neglect of him but because of his own guilty despair.
Many of the tales are even more unfathomable. In the Penal Colony presents an officer who demonstrates his devotion to duty by submitting himself to the appalling (and clinically described) mutilations of his own instrument of torture. This theme, the ambiguity of a task's value and the horror of devotion to it—one of Kafka's constant preoccupations—appears again in “A Hunger Artist.” The fable “Vor dem Gesetz” (1914; “Before the Law,” later incorporated into The Trial) presents both the inaccessibility of meaning (the “law”) and man's tenacious longing for it. A group of fables written in 1923–24, the last year of Kafka's life, all centre on the individual's vain but undaunted struggle for understanding and security.
Many of the motifs in the short fables recur in the novels. In Amerika, for example, the boy Karl Rossmann has been sent by his family to America. There he seeks shelter with a number of father figures. His innocence and simplicity are everywhere exploited, and a last chapter describes his admission to a dreamworld, the “nature-theatre of Oklahoma”; Kafka made a note that Rossmann was ultimately to perish. --encyclopedia Britannica
