Franz Kafka On Existence
A recent discussion in my Western Culture course has caused me to re-visit the world-view of surrealist author Franz Kafka. The professor was discussing how the government finds a way to subjugate and submit the individual under its command against his own will. She later went on to elaborate how she herself has been the victim of this process. The situation which was presented in the class resembled that of a Kafka story, particularly that of The Trial.
When one continues to closely inspect this story about a young CFO by the name of Josef K. getting accused of crime he did not commit without a single indication as to what the crime itself was, and his attempts to fight this injustice against the very vague and pseudo-totalitarian court, it is very easy to lose sight of the underlying message Kafka was trying to convey through his unfinished novel.
Beneath the surface of what appears to be a crime novel lies a philosophical message dealing with the despair and absurdity of modern existence. Kafka extensively discussed how he viewed his (and the worlds) condition during the early part of the 20th Century. He viewed existence as a burden and a menace to the harmony of reality. The world was a cold and shallow place to be in. Almost everyone he surrounded himself with had no interest in who he was as a person nor his talents as a writer. A bureaucrat for most of his life, he rarely discussed literature and philosophy with work people. He considered his job displeasing and tiresome, and it is evident that much such predicaments came to affect his physical and emotional health towards the end of his short life.
Much of the tone of how he viewed life was vividly expressed through his fiction. An indifferent and lifeless environment consumes his passages. Descriptions of buildings, cars, and apartments give the impression of order and strictness, with dim lights and consuming darkness covering most of the area. This might strike a casual reader as a lack of creative talent, but upon further inspection we are left to see that the descriptions have come to represent a certain aura of angst made to act as another obstacle in the character’s way. We see time and time again how Josef K. expresses these same sentiments through many passages of the book.
