Give Up

It's strange how often you can read the same thing without reading the same thing.

When I first read Kafka's short story (very short - barely more than a paragraph) Gibs Auf, I took it at face value. A story of a man who was trying to get to the train station in an unfamiliar town and became disoriented after noticing he was running late. He asks a "guardsman" for directions, and the guardsman rather unhelpfully says "you want advice from me? Ha! Give up! Give up!"

So, I read that as being a story about a man who encounters a less than useful person on his way to the train station.

Later I read some "comprehension" questions, and they were asking some questions that made very little sense if you read the story the way I had. It took me a while to realise that the person who had written the questions was interpreting the story as a parable or a metaphor, rather than a straight narrative.

So I reread the story, and noticed you could interpret it completely differently. It could be a parable about a man who has been travelling through life quite without realising what was going on around him, when he receives a "wake-up call" pointing out how much time has passed while he wasn't paying attention. Suddenly, he's no longer sure of himself, what he is doing, where he should be going. He turns to a source of authority looking for answers, but the truth is authority cannot provide direction.

Dream sequence with reflections of angst from growing older? Parable? Metaphor? Story of a guy who is going to miss his train?

That's literature for you.