Odradek's proverbs

There are not many proverbs in Kafka although many of his shorter pieces are like fairy tales. However in The Next Village the Grandfather says 'even the span of normal happy life may fall short of the time needed for such a journey'; if not a proverb it can, spoken by a Grandfather, be cast in the form of a sententious remark intended to say a something meaningful about collective experience. But this is not quite like the familiar proverbial form like Chaucer's 'I haste and evere I am behinde'.
So what can we learn from the Next Village proverb? Certainly it does not convey a common sense truth like Chaucer's. Kafka's Odradek only speaks twice: to provide his name and address (no fixed abode). But if he did speak further he would probably speak only in proverbs ie worn out phrases and cliches. For Walter Benjamin, Odradek is the commodity that survives to no purpose or an image of an outlived world of things-a kitsch entity and peddler of proverbs. But most proverbs are transparent like Chaucer's. Virginia Woolf remarked on the difficulty of presenting the lives of ostlers and rat catchers etc in fiction; they rapidly become curiosities or stereotypes. In Chaucer, she adds, they are simply themselves so the above proverb would have meant something to the Canterbury travellers. Can the same be said for householders in the Prague of 1917? What could 1917 Prague Householders learn from Odradek? Perhaps that, no longer able to be themselves, condemned to rely on worn out and used-up proverbs, they are like Odradek.