What he saw as the existentially crushing weight of employment within the bureaucracy of a large company hampered the pure writing life that Kafka felt he was meant for. And yet it was the very experience of navigating and existing within that faceless establishment that inspired much of what has come to be known as “Kafkaesque” in his writing: the insubordination of the individual to the larger machine, the overwhelming and confusion-inducing bureaucracy, the incomprehensible structure imposed from some nebulous above. He didn’t see it that way, but his full-time employment inspired some of
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