On Parables is a short story fragment by Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

. The piece consists of a narrative on the merit of parables. If in fact, the debate over if they are useful or merely folklore

Folklore

Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

 handed down from one generation to the next. The narrator

Narrator

A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...

 mentions parables are not necessarily useful, after all they've been around for many years yet people still struggle with the same difficulties despite their "wisdom." In fact, the story ends by claiming the text

Text (literary theory)

A text, within literary theory, is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. This set of symbols is considered in terms of the informative message's content, rather than in terms of its physical form or the medium in which it is represented...

 in itself can be interpreted as a parable

Parable

A parable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, which illustrates one or more instructive principles, or lessons, or a normative principle. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as characters, while parables generally feature human...

.

Analysis

The story was written while Kafka was reading Judaica, and was particularly interested in the lore associated with Mishna. Interestingly, Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks are full of parables, many observations about daily life intertwined with poignant twists.