The Franz Kafka Effect

It was one of Late March Afternoon’s when I decided to take a trip into the world of Kafka’s philosophy but honestly it took me up to this August to dive in and meditate on his words.

The first impression I had on his personality is confusion, the man is full with conversations, roses, ashes and huge disappointment from the whole world to the point that it hurts..

He also had a familiar impact on me like the one I had when I read Dostoevsky's Insulted and humiliated, the same feeling of characters trying and trying but get nothing.

Now I’m breaking down his complete stories, and how I see them, feel them.

-  Before the Law

Before the law reflected a man who decided to search by himself in a quest for the wisdom of life, which made him go to the gates that if only he passed through the three of them along with their doorkeepers, He will finally and truly find his purpose, or at least his questions answered, but the doorkeeper is following the orders to keep that man from passing through as “ it’s not his time yet!”, The man thinks about trying to fake his way into the gate, but then decided to stay patient.

Years go by and the man gets old and also his minds sharpness gets loose.. that he forgets his entire goal to pass the gates and focus on how angry he is with the the doorkeeper.

One days he asks him, how is this the house of wisdom and no one by the year has come through to pass expect me, and why am I being stopped if no visitors are there?

The doorkeeper told him this gate was made only for you, and now it’s time to shut it down.

The short story leaves us puzzled, maybe angry too, what happened?

  the story manages  to describe our continuous hunger for knowledge, to know more ignoring the fact that no one knows it all.

Also sometimes the lessons we have to learn are from the journey not from reaching the goal and that implies on the things the doorkeeper kept talking about with the man.

Unfortunately the time passes and the man gets old without reaching his goal, without seeking wisdom through meditating his way to the gate, that leads to waste potentials that made him go furious on the gatekeeper.. who finally sips the tea for him.. that this gate was made only for him, and he lost his chance to get through it as it’s shutting down.

I think the story aims to advice us to be flexible with life.. seek knowledge through different channels and not to focus our resources on one channel that we aren’t even sure that it will work for us.

This story reminds me of how we as students always wanted to get into specific  universities or get  a specific job and after spending our  whole essence on it we find it leaving us without a closure.

This story reminds me of the stepfather in Dostoevsky's nameless nobody (Netochka Nezvanova)

and but the character improvement in the stepfather case is the strange situation of paranoia and seeing that everyone don’t deserve his talent, till he saw the real talent and lost his senses.

- An IMPERIAL message.

In this short story, we dive into a fictional world of dimensions.. where the dead king tries to send his message to his pathetic subject.. in this story Kafka addresses the person whom will receive the story with being a low life sad being.. also the story introduces us to another person, the messenger who is going to be the hero of the story.. he travels through the dimensions, fights the crowd and even about to fly if it takes.. but eventually once he thought he reached his point, he finds himself passed only one dimension, the loop goes on and on.. and eventually the pathetic being never gets the message.

The story tells us on how one can be overqualified and yet doesn’t reach his purpose.

Again Kafka dives into lost potentials and not reached purposes.

The dimensional world reminds me of the interstellar, while the losing purpose reminds me of doomed to be separated love story in lala land, while eventually.. the way he sees the message receiver reminds me of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

WritteN on 8/8/2023