The hardest bones, containing the richest marrow, can be conquered only by a united crushing of all the teeth of all dogs. That of course is only a figure of speech and exaggerated; if all teeth were but ready they would not need even to bite, the bones would crack themselves and the marrow would be freely accessible to the feeblest of dogs. If I remain faithful to this metaphor, then the goal of my aims, my questions, my inquiries, appears monstrous, it is true. For I want to compel all dogs thus to assemble together, I want the bones to crack open under the pressure of their collective preparedness, and then I want to dismiss them to the ordinary life they love, while all by myself, quite alone, I lap up the marrow. That sounds monstrous, almost as if I wanted to feed on the marrow, not merely of bone, but of the whole canine race itself. But it is only a metaphor. The marrow that I am discussing here is no food; on the contrary, it is a poison.

She became his lover and caused him to become interested in the Talmud. Opinions ranged from the notion that he satirised the bureaucratic bungling of a crumbling Austria-Hungarian Empire to suggesting that he embodied the rise of socialism. During a vacation in July 1923 to Graal-Müritz on the Baltic Sea Kafka met Dora Diamant a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher from an orthodox Jewish family.

He prepared the story collection Ein Hungerkünstler (A Hunger Artist) for print but it was not publiFranz Kafkad until after his death. His works such as "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis") Der Process (The Trial) and Das Schloss (The Castle) are filled with the themes and archetypes of alienation physical and psychological brutality parent–child conflict characters on a terrifying quest and mystical transformations. He had a complicated and troubled relationship with his father that had a major impact on his writing and he was conflicted over his Jewishness and felt it had little to do with him although it debatably influenced his writing.