A Contrastive Study of Kafka and Beckett
Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. A Contrastive Study of Sheir Short-Prose Writings 1. The Literary Heritage of Samuel Beckett’s and Franz Kafka’s short-prose writings When confronted with the task to compare two major writers that lived and created in two different periods if not two different literary epochs, one can not stop pondering upon the most essential and overwhelming features encountered all throughout their literary work. Thus, one can easily distinguish these by referring to poststructuralist approaches to Beckett’s literary work: "What is different about Beckett is not that he provokes a critical response ...but the protean, open ended , ‘undecidable’ and inexhaustible quality of the challenge he offers. In this, it seems to us, he is the poet of the poststructuralist age. Not that he was not the poet of other ages too for he was-Beckett as the quintessential nouveau romancier, Beckett the Cartesian, Beckett the Existen...