"Parable of Abraham"

Book Review # 116352

English > Analysis
Literature > European (other)

A review of Franz Kafka's "Parable of Abraham".

1,313 words () | 0 sources | 2009 United States

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how Franz Kafka, in his "Parable of Abraham", restructures the Biblical telling of God's mandate to Abraham that he sacrifice his son, Isaac, despite God's promises that Abraham's name would be perpetuated through Isaac's legacy. The paper looks at how Kafka takes the story of a man described as completely, blindly obedient to his faith - a man that is asked to make a sacrifice in the Old Testament that only God Himself would make in the New - and applies his modern, somewhat reductive, sensibilities upon it to manufacture a self-created, humanist Man in place of the "laughing" godhead that figures so prominently in Kafka's writing.

From the Paper:

"Further, just by postulating that "[Abraham] is afraid" he introduces an element of ambiguity in the Abraham story that marks it as stained by humanism and removed, some would say elevated, in that sense from the flat allegory presented in the Bible. Abraham, later in the passage, reveals that his fear is not only in the essential absurdity of the situation (he must slay the son that is to bring him immortality says the being the promised the latter while mandating the former), but that his fear is grounded in the fact that he suspects that it's all some kind of grand joke played at his expense by God that will be instantly recognized by all the Others in his society. "