KAFKA IS REMARKABLE, above all, for the visual density of his writing, a visual prowess that can be linked to his self-image as an “eye-person” (Augenmensch). His extraordinary literary imagination generates an imagery that startles and challenges the reader who expects the recognizable. Kafka’s intent, it has been said, is “to make strange the familiar.” Like his much admired model, Gustave Flaubert, he radically changed the fictional worlds that European realism had mapped out. The transformative power of his writing, however, unlike Flaubert’s, arises from the stark, suggestive force of his images: the resulting dynamics of puzzlement and shock reveal the crafty use of the gaze, cinematic techniques, and intermedial linkages. Many of Kafka’s narratives rely on the gaze of the main characters; he employs cinematic means to structure the visual plane of his narratives; and he connects the elements of different media to produce an active exchange of medial domains.

Kafka found new means of representation. Metamorphosing the metaphor, he suspended its literalization. The familiar seems fantastic, while the unfamiliar takes on the appearance of the normal and realistic. Kafka’s visuality uses innovative strategies and transformative techniques to create a literary and intermedial imaginary that is both realist and fantastic. He clearly privileges the perception and representation of the visual. Kafka critics have noticed the filmic quality of his texts, commenting also on his love of contemporary cinema, although the extent to which Kafka “goes to the movies” in his writing is in some dispute. While some critics claim that Kafka’s writings are not informed by the cinema, others see a significant intermediality. Nonetheless, Kafka’s “visual method” uses the main character as a narrative vehicle and center of perception, employing the cinema as a model and structuring principle. This results in a form of cinematic representation that asks the reader to experience a viewer’s perception.

Kafka often begins his narratives by inhabiting the position of observer. This is true for his earliest extant narrative, “Description of a Struggle” (“Beschreibung eines Kampfes,” 1936), an unfinished work, parts of which were probably begun in 1902. Remarkable for its structural complexity and intricacy of theme and variations, this narrative strategically places the first-person narrator as passive observer at a Lenten party, making him the agent or focalizer of narrated perception.