The paper focuses on a special type of Franz Kafka's short prose texts, as exemplified by "Über Gleichnisse".

The predominant approach taken in the research literature is to regard those pieces as self-interpreting and self-reducing ad absurdum: such a text states the general impossibility of interpreting and understanding texts, and thereby demonstrates (because it is, in a sense, an attempt to an interpretation of a text, namely: itself) the impossibility of interpreting itself. So it is in a strong sense paradoxical.

In my paper this approach is critizised from two directions: the idea of a piece of prose as interpreting itself is shown to be incoherent, and an explanation is given of the difficulty in understanding those texts in a consistent way while avoiding the accusation of paradoxicality.

The perspective is then widened to another feature of Kafka's short prose texts which is equally seen as highly characteristical: their frequent possession of a Pointe, or punch line. The most famous example here is, of course, "Vor dem Gesetz", also often referred to as a 'parable'.