A character is not a simulation of a living being. It is an imaginary being. An experimental self. In that way the novel reconnects with its beginnings.

M.K.: Heidegger characterizes existence by an extremely well-known formulation: in-der-Welt-sein, being-in-the-world. Man does not relate to the world as subject to object, as eye to painting; not even as actor to stage set. Man and the world are bound together like the snail to its shell: the world is part of man, it is his dimension, and as the world changes, existence (in-der-Welt-sein) changes as well. Since Balzac, the world of our being has a historical nature, and characters’ lives unfold in a realm of time marked by dates.

The world according to Kafka: the bureaucratized universe. The office not merely as one kind of social phenomenon among many but as the essence of the world.

Is it a novel? Yes, to my mind. The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.

According to a well-known metaphor, the novelist demolishes the house of his life and uses its bricks to construct another house: that of his novel. From which it follows that a novelist’s biographers unmake what the novelist made, and remake what he unmade. Their labor, from the standpoint of art utterly negative, can illuminate neither the value nor the meaning of a novel. The moment Kafka draws more attention than Joseph K., the process of Kafka’s posthumous dying begins.