“I want above all to get home,” Karl points out early in the novel. Establishing an identity was, moreover, a problem compounded by the question of home, a question that was important both to the immigrant and to the Czech. Kafka seemed to intuit that being someone, or anyone, in the geographical vastness of America was not altogether different from the problem of being someone in the bureaucratic vastness of German-dominated Prague. Appropriately enough, in Kafka’s America much of the action takes place in the deepest night, at the deepest levels of the subconscious and of the spirit. Drawing on a host of sources-including Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and the poetry of Walt Whitman-and calling to the reader’s mind an even more formidable array of literary analogues-from William Shakespeare’s one play set in the Americas, The Tempest, to Henry James’s international novels, Kafka conjures an America more fabulous than factual. Certain odd details reveal one Continental impression of this land at a time when so many Eastern Europeans were emigrating. The United States that Kafka depicts is more based upon myth than any real experience of the place. While this reminded me of Alice's initial fall into the rabbit hole it also alerted me that I was in a Kafka novel, albeit a slightly different type than I had read before. Within moments he is lost in the maze of the multiple levels of the ship looking for an umbrella he left behind. His absurdist novel Amerika begins with young Karl viewing the Statue of Liberty and feeling 'the free winds of heaven” on his face. Though one of the most famous stay-at-homes in literature, Kafka read widely including travel books. Franz Kafka broke off writing his first novel, Amerika, on January 24, 1913.

Franc kafka amerika