The Cares of a Family Man

Odradek appears to represent an object with no clear purpose or apparent use. It appears not unlike an exhausted spool for thread, wound about by "old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors". However, the text makes it explicit that there is no apparent use for the object. As such, scholars such as Samuel Rammelmeier have argued that the obscurity and uselessness of the object serves to create a foil for the narrator.[6] He argues that the object's apparent uselessness, when seen in light of the existential dread pervading the last paragraph, can be understood as underlining the narrator's lack of purpose. This is an opinion shared by Heinz Politzer when he states that Kafka's absurdist writing emphasizes the meaninglessness of its subjects' lives.[7] Such an interpretation can be compared to the nihilist tone of Kafka's better-known work, The Metamorphosis.

Willi Goetschel analyzes "The Cares of a Family Man" from several perspectives. From the perspective of Marxist literary criticism the story might be a critique of capitalism in its last stage. Odradek represents commodities, it is "what is left of life once everything is reduced to materialism".[8]

Anya Meksin agrees that this interpretation is possible from a Marxist perspective. Odradek, being made of thread for mending, represents the world of manmade practical objects separated from the human work that produced them, and the relation between the house father and Odradek represents the alienated relation between worker and commodities he has produced. The idea that Odradek will survive the narrator and the anguish this situation causes to him can also be interpreted as the idea of commodities being inherited and transcend the worker who made them, but in such a way that the worker himself would be completely ignored.[9]

According to Goetschel, from a Freudian approach Odradek can be seen as "the psychological return of the repressed". In Freud's theory of repression, an unacknowledged trauma surfaces as unconscious associations and neuroses, which affect thought, memory and dreams.[10] Such an interpretation is supported by Kafka's letters and biography: in approximately 1921, he wrote a letter to Milena Jesenka in which he explains his mental disturbances in a distinctly Freudian light.[11] Furthermore, Kafka's Letter to His Father indicates that Kafka had suffered from emotional trauma due to his childhood, which lends biographical weight to this argument.

A religious perspective opens up another interpretation of the text. Goetschel indicates that the star-shaped form of the creature might represent tradition (specifically Jewish tradition), which is passed on from generation to generation and accumulates some more bits of "thread" in each generation.

According to Meksin, Odradek represents a rupture between the world of the family man and some other transcendent realm. It is immortal, and hides in shadows carrying a message from generation to generation, and witnessing it all. Meksin goes on to indicate that the physical description of Odradek with its wooden crossbar sticks joined to that at a right angle can also remind us of crucifixion.

While Rammelmeier argues against clean-cut metaphorical interpretations of the story, he acknowledges that Odradek possesses some supernatural qualities, such as disappearance and reappearance.[12] He states that these supernatural qualities are made all the more prominent by the text's otherwise objective or sachlich style. He adds that, due to the text's stylistic dryness, a reader who reads the story through an ideological lens may find evidence for any interpretation they may wish to hold. Nevertheless, the story's last passage and its concern with "my children's children", the object's apparent lack of purpose, the ephemeral qualities of Odradek, the religious symbolism of the transverse rod and the star shape, and the mention of death in the last line of the story provide textual evidence for associations of Odradek to religion, or at least cultural traditions.[12]

Slavoj Žižek emphasizes in his analysis that Odradek "once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant," and as such it should be part of a whole. The relation between the narrator (a family man, a father) and the creature could be this whole: Odradek might be the complement of the narrator, who would also be broken down, with part of him transferred into Odradek. That is why Odradek is something a family man has to care for.[13]