His last words, as the knife is turned in his heart: “Like a dog!” — “it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.”
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsBefore the Law
A man from the country asks to be admitted to the Law; the doorkeeper says “not now”; he waits his whole life — and learns as he dies that this door was meant only for him.
Franz Kafka
Prague insurance clerk whose parables of guilt, bureaucracy and metamorphosis became the defining images of modern anxiety — and the word “Kafkaesque”.
On the Genealogy of Morality
Nietzsche’s three essays tracing “good and evil”, guilt, and the ascetic ideal back to their hidden, all-too-human origins.
The Divine Comedy
Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise — the summa of medieval thought in a hundred cantos, and one of the greatest poems ever written.
Faust
Goethe’s two-part dramatic poem of the scholar who wagers his soul with Mephistopheles that no moment of pleasure will ever satisfy him — the defining myth of modern restless striving.
Macbeth
Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy — a brave soldier, prompted by witches and his wife, murders his king and wades so deep in blood that life becomes “a tale told by an idiot”.