Kafka isn't simply saying books should move us—he's proposing something stranger and more demanding: that we are fundamentally *frozen*, and literature's job is violent, even necessary brutality. The axe isn't gentle persuasion or entertainment; it's a tool that shatters, that breaks the numbness we mistake for peace. When you finish a book that genuinely unsettles you, that makes your old assumptions crack, you recognize the feeling—it's the specific pain of thawing, not the comfort of being warmed. A student once told me that reading Dostoevsky made her angry at her own life in a way that felt like waking from anesthesia, and she was grateful for it.