Locking down with Kafka

How the great writer, in his airless, claustrophobic fictions, provides a guide to living in the pandemic age.

Gilded cage: Franz Kafka outside his residence in Prague, circa 1910. He described the city, his hometown, as having â?oclawsâ?? that would not let him go (Photo By ullstein bild via Getty Images)

In “A Report to an Academy”, a short story published by Franz Kafka in 1919, an ape named Red Peter gives a lecture to a scientific conference, recalling how he was hunted in the jungle and then awoke one day in a cage, unable to return to the old way of life he had loved.

“For the first time in my life I could see no way out,” the ape says of his captivity. “Hopelessly sobbing, painfully hunting for fleas, apathetically licking a coconut, beating my skull against the locker, sticking out my tongue at anyone who came near me – that was how I filled in time in my new life. But over and above it all only the one feeling: no way out.”