The trial - kafka

[Anonymous No.11045217]

How do you interpret the priest's Parable Before The Law"?
I saw it as a comment on how the person for whom the door was made is also partly responsible for his own helplessness as he failed to analyse the situation and submitted himself to a futile course of action (just like I feel Joseph K did in his trial) because of the assumptions he made.
Am I wrong?

[Anonymous No.11045340]

>>11045217
Did you read the part where they break it down part by part and analyze it right after?

[Anonymous No.11045374]

>>11045340
yes. of course. the priest discusses the notion of deception which seems obvious to joseph K at first but is elaborated on by the priest as something that didn't occur at all. That the doorkeeper never really lied or contradicted himself and just subserviently, simple-mindedly and honestly did what his duty was and even extending some compassion towards the man by answering his question before he seals the door.

The part that stood out to me was that in the analysis it became clear that the man who wanted admittance in some part was responsible for not exerting his will to enter the gate despite the doorkeeper being demonstrably subordinate to him.

Is kafka saying that the world around me will, for no reason, keep things away from me until i acquire the will to take them? That i will be made a subservient, helpless fool and that any realization about how i could have succeeded strike me too late? Am I projecting?

[Anonymous No.11045417]

>>11045374
I wouldn't say "the world" writ large, but certainly life's bureaucratic idiosyncrasies. I don't think it's necessarily supposed to be "got", as, like most of his work, it was written in the style of a paradox. If you really want some more context on this, read Parables and Paradoxes. There are plenty of stories in there that touch on the static yet ruinous power of bureaucracy. Check out Poseidon, The Animal in the Temple, and Couriers.

[Anonymous No.11045822]

>>11045417
ah I see. thanks for the recommendations anon. people like you are why i come to this board.

[Anonymous No.11045865]

OP here. Also is it just me or was the over the top nature of the helplessness kind of funny? how women would throw themselves at joseph only to be total cockteases and deprive him of going any further and not even taking blame for it? How every individual in the book who professes to help joseph only worsens his situation despite being completely faultless. how joseph is fucked over in such hilariously petty and infuriating ways. at times it was just funny.

[Anonymous No.11045896]

>SOME REMARKS ON KAFKA’S FUNNINESS FROM WHICH PROBABLY NOT ENOUGH HAS BEEN REMOVED

>What Kafka’s stories have, rather, is a grotesque, gorgeous, and thoroughly modern complexity, an ambivalence that becomes the multivalent Both/And logic of the, quote, “unconscious,” which I personally think is just a fancy word for soul. Kafka’s humor—not only not neurotic but anti-neurotic, heroically sane—is, finally, a religious humor, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. O’Connor’s bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made.


what did he mean by this?