"Parable of Abraham" Book Review by Jay Writtings LLC

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.