Kafka’s Prison

 

The world in Kafka’s fiction is a veritable prison in which you are not free though you are allowed the illusion of being free. As the police Inspector tells the protagonist of The Trial, “You are under arrest, certainly, but that need not hinder you from going about your business. You won’t be hampered in carrying on in the ordinary course of your life.”

Carry on in the ordinary course of your life. Eat, sleep, mate, and do some job like all other normal people. That is the ordinary course of life. If you dare to do more than that, the authorities will tell you in no uncertain terms that you are crossing your limits.

What are those limits, however? Kafka does not make it clear. His protagonists fight invisible forces. The so-called authority lies beyond the reach of the ordinary mortals in Kafka’s world. In The Trial, for example, it is the Law that determines the protagonist’s fate. What is the Law, however?

Joseph, the protagonist of The Trial, admits his ignorance of the Law to the officials who came to arrest him. He does not even believe that such a thing exists. Then one of the officials tells the other, “See, Willem, he admits that he doesn’t know the Law and yet he claims that he’s innocent.”

You can’t be innocent unless you know the Law, apparently. But ignorance of the Law is not the crime for which Joseph has been arrested. Moreover, knowing the Law isn’t quite possible either. Towards the end of the novel, a priest who is the prison chaplain of the place tells Joseph the story of a man who wanted “admittance to the Law.” The doorkeeper blocks him saying that his time has not come. The man waits for days for his time to arrive. Days pass into years. The man grows old sitting there waiting for his time for admittance to the Law. His eyesight is weakening now due to age. In the darkness of his failing vision, he can perceive a radiance that streams immortally from the door of the Law. His life is ending, however. As he is dying he asks a final question to the doorkeeper. “Everyone strives to attain the Law. Why is it then that I am the only one who has been waiting here for years to gain admittance?”

The doorkeeper answers, “No one but you could gain admittance through this door since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.”

Every person has a unique entrance to the Law. But everyone does not get to enter that mysterious Law. Does anyone manage to enter the Law at all? Well, there is no clear answer in Kafka’s world. Are we all living in the prison where necessities matter more than truths? “It is not necessary to accept everything as true,” the priest counsels Joseph, “one must only accept it as necessary.”

Kafka’s world is a post-truth world. In post-truth world, truths don’t matter; necessities do. Those who can’t accept the necessities (created by the authorities) are condemned to imprisonment, if not death. Joseph, in The Trial, gets death in the end. He does not know what his crime is even when he is taken by the agents of the authorities to his ultimate end.

The executioners take Joseph out of the town to a bleak, deserted stone quarry. Joseph is stripped half-naked. When he shivers involuntarily, he is given a pat on his back by one of his executioners. The pat notwithstanding, Joseph knows that his end is imminent. Yet he longs for a helping hand. Can help come now? Were there some arguments in his favour that had been overlooked? Of course there must be. That is logic. But logic doesn’t help beyond a point. What more could be done, however? Joseph had spent a whole year doing his best to save himself. He could not even discover where the Judge sat, let alone see him. Where was the Court? Joseph was utterly helpless.

One of the executioners holds him by the throat. The other thrusts a knife into his heart and turns it there twice. Joseph’s vision flails. He can still see his two executioners watching him die. “Like a dog!” Joseph mutters. The novel ends with this sentence: “It was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.”

What shame is Kafka speaking about? The shame of the death? Or is it the shame of life itself?

Some of us are on a relentless quest throughout our life. Most of Kafka’s characters were on some quest or the other. The ordinary life of eat-sleep-mate-work doesn’t satisfy them. Life has to have some meaning beyond those animal acts. What is that meaning? Like the man who died in front of the door to the Law in the priest’s story, after waiting for years and years for his chance to enter the door that was meant only for him, the seekers of greater truths than those created by the earthly authorities are condemned to a canine shame in the end! That tragic state of affairs is Kafka’s prison. Are you living in one such prison? Your answer implies the nature of your quest.

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Read the previous parts of this series below:

A: Absurdity

B: Bandwagon Effect

C: Chiquitita’s Sorrows

D: Delusions

E: Ego Integrity

F: Fictional Finalism

G: The Good Child

H: Humanism: Celebration of Life

I: Intelligence is not enough

J: Just-world Bias