“Give It Up!,” a flash fiction by Franz Kafka manages to use every element of fiction to end with a brilliant last line, a necessity in a strong flash fiction. The work’s strange intensity makes it feel contemporary. “Give It Up” relates to themes common in Kafka’s oeuvre, the sense of being trapped in the endless wheel of an impersonal and bureaucratic society.
Kafka’s better known work, the Metamorphosis, has elements of the same strange hopelessness.
