Since my first encounter with Kafka's writing, I've been interested in a quality that, while he was alive, stood in the way of his achieving a large reputation: his allegory.
I don't know if this is a stumbling block, but I had a real setback when I won a Nebula Award for the first story I ever had nominated for a Nebula in 1982. And you might think that was a good thing - and it was a wonderful thing, I don't regret it a bit. But I was sort of discombobulated by it.
Kafka is not interested in documenting the manners and mores of any particular place; he is not interested in probing the psyche of individual characters.
Kafka's inevitable tropism for the allegorical puts him in marked opposition to the realism that dominated the literary world of the first half of the 20th century.
