A dog's life - Kafkaesque

Franz Kafka never finished the longish story "Investigations of a Dog," and it's easy to see why - it's a meandering story that takes a long time making its key points - obviously another attempt by him to write a story from the consciousness of another species. But his earlier story A Report to an Academy, by an ape with human qualities, was much more successful, focused and with a more clearly defined narrative voice. All that said, Investigations still has enough Kafka elements to make it great by some measures, despite its lack of completion and overall structure: in particular, it has some good Borscht-belt humor, such as the basic credo of dog life: water the ground at every opportunity. What makes the story strange and worthwhile is the dog belief that food comes either from the ground (due to watering) or from above - and for the food from above the dogs much sing and dance - that is, act like dogs seeking human attention - but also, on a deeper level, like people, praying, for some blessing from an unseen god - so this is yet another one of K's stories about the inefficacy of religion, the disappearance of god, the idiocy of human-centered consciousness, and the loneliness and despair of the individual - Woody Allen meets Dostoyevsky (e.g., Underground Man) - and it all sounds miserable, yet the wit and humor make these stories very readable and enduring.