In Kafka's stories it is not so much the things and events in themselves which are disturbing as the fact that his characters react to them as they would to normal things and events, with little emotion. What makes the reading of his stories such a gruesome experience is his manner of treating the grotesque as everyday normality; not the fact that Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a beetle, but that he sees nothing surprising in his fate. This principle, which might be termed the principle of 'soundless explosion', consists in withholding even a pianissimo where a fortissimo is expected; there is no change of volume at all — the world simply goes on as before.

Kafka achieves his deliberately unsensational effect by a method of literary inversion of the kind we have already mentioned; that is, subject and object are inverted or interchanged, as in all fables. This may sound like a purely grammatical point, but in fact it is much more. In order to convey the truth, 'Men are like beasts', Aesop shows us that 'Beasts are men'; by representing robbers as ordinary citizens, Brecht in his Threepenny Operashows that 'Ordinary citizens are robbers'. In order to bring home to us that the things which are accepted as a matter of course in our world are horrible, Kafka inverts the terms and treats blatant horrors as a matter of course. .. If we are shown without further explanation how in reality men are not rendered speechless by the unspeakabale, nor horrified by what is horrifying, this revelation is in itself both eloquent and terrible, and indeed more telling than if Kafka had made the victim of the execution-machine in the Penal Colony roar like an Ajax.

What Kafka describes is not so much what is, i.e. the world to which the individual belongs and owes his being, as the state of not-belonging, that is, of not being. Or more exactly: he describes, first, how the world of being appears to the outsider (i.e. as an alien world); and, secondly, the desperate efforts which this unsubstantial and homeless creature makes in order to gain acceptance in this world.

If Kafka's world is transfigured it is not with the radiance of eternity; for him it is the very temporal, commonplace world which has become 'infinitely' remote, inaccessible, mysterious. And this because he (or his hero K.) stands so far outside it, that the 'here-and-now' assumes the character of a 'beyond'. Not, however (and the point should be stressed), the character of an ultimate paradise to be attained, least of all in the 'worldly' sense of a Utopian Socialist future. In no sense is it the world to come which is Kafka's 'beyond', but the actual world. In the same way he 'who is to come' is himself, the alien; it is he who has yet to arrive in the world, and to make himself part of the world.

Kafka's heroes are the victims of a kind of original sin, though not in the Christian sense. Simply because from the start they are shut out of paradise (which in their case is the world), they are guilty, and every cuplable act is the result of this prior situation. 

Whereas allegory presents humanized abstractions, Kafka's stories represent abstract human beings. These men and women are 'abstract' in the sense suggested by the original Latin word abstrahere: they have been removed, torn away from the fulness of human existence. any of them are indeed nothing but functions: this man is a messneger and nothing else, that woman is a useful contact and nothing else.
… Societies have reached the dreadful state where a man who has no particular function to perform may be regarded as not real, as nothing, as unworthy of life.

It is the reply of those deprived of their power, of those who are irresponsible because no responsibility is left to them — in short, of those who do not really live but whose lives are used by others.
If a man is nothing but his profession, if his being is nothing more than the role for which he is 'cut out', then he himself is indeed a nonentity, existing not in his own right but, as it were, by permissions of the authorities, an authorized copy of his own official papers.

We might liken the lightness of Kafka's style to the lightness of a man who, compared with the weightiness of the world, has been weighed and found wanting; its gaiety is not that of a serious man, but of the man who is not taken seriously.

From Gunter Ander's Kafka, via Flowerville