End of A Mission : Kafka's Search for the Truth in his Last Stories

Fickert's critique of Kafka's shorter narratives written in or after 1917 concentrates on the writer's subjective poetics.

The concept of his raising his fiction to the life of "the pure, the true, the immutable", which Kafka considered to be his goal in writing, undergoes detailed analysis in this study, which deals with the origins of the concept itself and Kafka's exposition of it. Using the facts of his own life as the basis for startling metaphors deployed in a series of ingeniously crafted stories, Kafka sought to define the mission he felt he had as a writer.

Professor Fickert argues that Kafka was also intent on conveying to the reader a sense of the urgency of the messages the narratives in all their complexity are meant to promulgate. The book is aimed both at those interested in modern fiction in general and scholars in the field of Kafka criticism.

All quotations from Kafka's stories are given both in the original German and in English translation.