Enormous ‘Fatherbodies’: Kafka’s Brief an den Vater and Peter Stephan Jungk’s Die Reise über den Hudson

Images of a father’s overwhelmingly large body (“fatherbody”) form an intertextual web between Kafka and Jungk, whose writings employ such images to address and reflect on father-son antagonism through literature. The “fatherbodies” function as conduits of memory, which evoke patterns of father-son conflict and serve as the path and impediments to sons’ autonomy. The protagonist-son of each text must therefore contend with the father- body, in his attempts to elude paternal authority or to bridge a generational divide.While the depicted fathers belong to different generations, they share attitudes toward their sons’ upbringing, education, profession, religion, and marriage. Along these routes, both sons try to emancipate themselves from their fathers’ influence and to repair their ruptured relationships