Kafka and the uncanny : Three stories

Three Franz Kafka stories that, at least in my mind, form a series or trilogy, perhaps because they are conjunctive in the Modern Language edition of Kafka's "Selected Stories," where I first encountered his work: A Report to an Academy, The Hunter Gracchus, and The Hunger Artist. I don't know if this collection is arranged consecutively, or if we even know the order of composition of K's works, but these seem stylistically of a piece and a break from his earlier stories that were more frenetic and extreme: these three very controlled and almost quiet, pensive. Report is told in first person by an ape who was captured and who learned human behavior as a "way out" of his captivity (a term he uses a lot) - on the most superficial level it's a critique of a supposedly civilized society that imprisons animals for the pleasure of humans, and on a second level a critique of a society that enforces various degrees of human slavery - but K's not primarily a polemical author - there are deeper and stranger meanings to all of his stories: the ape representing a part of all human behavior, the "id" would have been the term of art in K's day, and the unsettled quality of imagining an ape addressing a gentleman's club or whatever "academy" he's reporting to. Gracchus tells of a hunter who's brought into an inn apparently dead but then he wakens to tell his story to a visitor and apparently he is doomed to live through many cycles of apparent death and then revival, never able to find the peace of nonexistence; Hunger Artist about a man who "performs" by sitting in a cage and not eating, wasting away. What's especially strange about these 2 stories - like the Report - is that narrative tone, the calm and reasoned acceptance of this irrational behavior, supernatural condition, or surreal experience. (In the Penal Colony, one of the greatest of K's stories, is a parallel example, though in that case the oddity of the keepers of the execution machine is offset by the wonderment and puzzlement of their visitor, the Explorer.) Kafka consistently has the ability the make the uncanny all the more disturbing because it's not uncanny to his narrators or his protagonists.