BUGGING KAFKA

Lest readers fall prey to either the “Intentional Fallacy” and assign authorial intent where there was none, or to mere confusion arising from The Times staff’s misleading headline, “He Dreamed He Was a Cockroach,” which appeared above D. M. Thomas’ review of Frederick Karl’s “Franz Kafka: Representative Man” (Nov. 17), it is only fair to set the record straight.

It was Kafka’s short-story character, Gregor Samsa, in “The Metamorphosis” and not Kafka the author who awoke to find himself transformed into a giant insect. The story starts, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

In neither case did the character Samsa nor the author Kafka “dream” his condition. Kafka’s journals and comprehensive correspondence to his friend and biographer Max Brod never mention such a dream. The nightmarish experience of awakening to discover oneself a monstrous kind of vermin exists only within Kafka’s art.

ROSEMARY OELRICH CHOATE, PASADENA