6 ideas
As a small child Kafka whimpered for water at night, and his father carried him out and left him alone in his nightshirt on the balcony before the locked door. The story shows how one disproportionate act can set a child's whole sense of their own worthlessness before an authority.
Kafka divides the world into three parts. In the first he lives as a slave under laws invented only for him, which he can never fully obey. In the second his father rules and grows angry when he is disobeyed, and in the third everyone else lives happily, free of orders.
The father held his opinions to be correct because they were his, not because they were argued. He therefore took on the enigmatic quality of tyrants whose right rests on their person rather than their thought. A child facing such authority cannot win by reasoning, so every disagreement becomes a verdict on himself and he stops thinking in the father's presence.
The father threatened constantly, with lines like 'I'll tear you apart like a fish', and seldom carried the threats out. Because the child had already believed the punishment and then escaped it, he lived as someone undeservedly pardoned, which deepened his sense of guilt. Irony, invective and grievance aimed at others worked the same way, as condemnations the child absorbed without being able to answer.
Kafka pictures the world as a map with his father lying diagonally across it. The only regions open to him are those his father does not cover or cannot reach, and those are few and not very comforting. Seen this way, marriage and family, the father's greatest achievements, are exactly the territory the son cannot enter. His broken engagements follow from this structure rather than from indecision alone.
Kafka says his writing was all about his father: in it he poured out what he could not say against his father's chest. He calls it an intentionally long-drawn-out leave-taking. Writing was the one sphere partly free of paternal control, yet its subject remained the father, so it gave him escape and bondage at once.