In this blog post, we will examine the ontological anguish and alienation evident in Kafka’s life and works, focusing particularly on references to ‘The Trial’ to explore its literary form and meaning.
Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague and died on June 3, 1924, at the Kirling Sanatorium on the outskirts of Vienna. On the surface, his life appeared to be an extremely ordinary one. He was born the eldest son of Hermann, a Jewish merchant, and his wife Julie. After graduating from a German-language gymnasium, he studied law at Charles University in Prague. In 1906, he earned his doctorate in law and took a position as a clerk at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Office, where he worked until his retirement in 1922 due to tuberculosis.
He was engaged three times but broke off all three engagements; two of these (in 1914 and 1917) were with Felice Bauer, and the other (in 1919) was with Julie Boriczek. Apart from two or three romantic relationships—such as his affair with Milena Jesenská (1920–22) and his happy union with Dora Diamant (1923–24)—his life appeared, on the surface, to be a very ordinary one, devoid of any major upheavals.
Internally, however, it was 41 years of extreme unhappiness and anguish. His anguish began at the very moment of his birth. As he states in his work ‘A Country Doctor’, he was born into this world bearing a deep wound. Although he was born Jewish, he belonged not to the so-called Eastern Jews—who had steadfastly maintained the resilience of their ethnic identity—but to the Western Jews, who had been Europeanized. Yet, having been born Jewish, he could never truly belong to the Christian world. As a German speaker, he was not a Czechoslovak; nor was he a Bohemian German simply because he spoke German; nor did he belong to Austria merely because he was born in Bohemia. On the other hand, as an official at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Office, he did not belong to the general working class; nor was he a member of the working class, having been born into a family of factory owners. Since he claimed to be a writer, he was not strictly an official; yet, since he devoted his energy to the household managed by his father, he was not a writer in the full sense of the word either.
He was an “outsider” from the moment of his birth—belonging a little to many worlds yet belonging completely to none. That was the fateful nature of his birth, and he suffered from this wound throughout his life.
To exist means to belong to a particular world. Not belonging to any world is not existence. Existence acquires meaning only to the extent that it belongs to the coordinates we call “the world.” In Kafka’s case, he was born bearing the original sin of being an outsider—that is, of having lost his very existence—unable to belong to any world. The anguish and efforts of his entire life were focused on the question of how he could enter the world and belong to it—that is, how he could attain the measure of existence.
Modern society set out by holding high the banner of humanism and setting the complete liberation of humanity as its goal. However, due to the abnormal development of science and technology, the means became independent of the ends and, conversely, came to dominate them. In other words, technology came to dominate the economy, and the economy came to dominate humanity; it became the norm in social life to stop at nothing to achieve one’s ends. Human dignity vanished, and the masses were reduced to faithful robots of mechanical civilization. A rupture emerged between modern and traditional cultures, and modern people, having lost their spiritual anchor, became isolated both spatially and temporally.
Meanwhile, individuals who cannot become cogs in the machine have become outcasts of mass society. In other words, individuals who do not understand the laws of modern society are destined to remain eternal outsiders, unable to belong in this world. The laws of modern society do not tolerate humans retaining their original nature, and its vast economic apparatus has thoroughly reduced humans to mere functions, abstracted them, and dehumanized them. In short, the process of human alienation has progressed. Human authenticity can no longer exist; what exists is only the “professional human” who faithfully fulfills the functional roles dictated by the mechanisms of society.
This is precisely why the characters in Kafka’s works are all depicted solely in terms of their strictly professional functions. As W. Emrich also points out, what is at issue in Kafka’s literary world is human existence itself. Human existence itself—caught in the ceaseless tension between various opposites such as life and death, hope and despair, truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence, freedom and bondage, existence and nonexistence, belief and skepticism, knowledge and ignorance, and the earthly and the otherworldly—is embodied in images and spiritual language.
In order for these images and language to faithfully and truthfully reflect the simultaneous existence of human contradictions, they inevitably must take the form of paradoxes. To put it another way, the narrative form itself—that is, a method of narration in which the image is established only to be discarded, and an interpretation is formed only to be negated—is itself the very expression of human existence. This means that, just as the minutest details of a work do, the work as a whole becomes an image of the essential structure of the human spirit, and the narrative form itself becomes a symbol.
Herein lies the reason why Kafka’s novels can continue indefinitely and lack a definitive conclusion or an original ending. His novels do not take a specific problem of the individual and shape it in a particular way to reach a conclusion; rather, they create a model of human existence, and that model, by its very nature, cannot be brought to a conclusion.
Because Kafka’s literature possesses this fragmentary and unfinished character, no image or idea in his work is depicted for its own sake; rather, it possesses only a functional significance. Kafka’s literature, with its absolute functionality, must not be understood on the premise that it contains any specific historical, ideological, or psychological content. It must be understood solely as a model of human existence, in terms of form itself.
