What makes Kafka weird

The Great Wall of China is another great exemplar of some of the key elements of Franz Kafka's sensibility and literary style: like most Kafka stories, it starts off in the most ordinary and matter-of-face manner: for the first fe pages, it's a somewhat drab and straightforward account of the process of construction of the Great Wall, and only a few pages in does Kafka establish that the story is being narrated by someone who was part of the construction process. He tells us that, rather than build the wall in long segments it was built in a series of short and unconnected segments that were late seamed together - though it is rumored that there are gaps in the wall, yet no one can be certain of this. The all as a series of small segments, unconnected in places, is an extremely strange and disconcereting image, typical of K: what we believe should be a seamless whole, a great monument of civilization, a force for defense from alien invaders, is in fact fragmented and broken: like our minds, and like out contemporary society in fact. After establishing this motif, K pushes the narrative further and darker: the teams building the walls are like impressed labor, kept from the families and homes for great stretches of time, moved about from segment to segment almost randomly, so none has a clear sense of the work as a whole - except that all are in service to the emperor. But who is this emperor? Perhaps he doen't exist at all. So again it's K's strange, or estanged, relations with a godlike - or father-like - authority figure. His stories are generally narrated as if they were relistic and straightforward, yet they encompass the most bizarre and disorienting sequences of facts and events, much like our dreams.