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Whereas I think Kafka does want the pain to last because he associates it with emotional awareness.
And for me, it isn't so much a question of catharsis as it is of understanding someone else's suffering. A book has the space in which to submerge the reader in someone else's world -- even more, it seems to me, than a film or song.
If you don't want to recreate (in yourself) the feeling of being someone who's imprisoned or tortured, I can understand that. It can seem pointlessly unpleasant. But as a person with relatives who died in German camps and Lithuanian ghettos, I feel I have a responsibility: to mourn them and honor their loss, of course, but also, in empathizing with how they felt, to touch their shoulders. I can see you, I tell them. I can see you and your life still matters.
Your reference to "Gloomy Sunday" is apt, especially if Holiday's singing it in that haunted shell of a voice she was left with at the end, that voice like a crumpled note found next to a body. But in terms of classical music, I don't think "Moonlight Sonata" expresses Kafka's pitch of pain. Mahler's Ninth Symphony or "Das Lied von der Erde" would be a little closer. I tend to think more of Berg's "Wozzeck" and "Lulu," though, which are closer still. But I hesitate to recommend them, since people are often rooted in tonality and find dissonance merely unpleasant, as you've said you do the suffering in sorrowful novels.
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