Analysis Of Franz Kafka's Before The Law

1889 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Economic during the late 19th century

Day after day, the farmer wakes up at dawn to milk the cows, feed the animals, plow the fields, and collect the crops. The man has a contract with corporate executives at a grocery chain who purchase his goods for the lowest possible rate, keeping the bulk of the profit for themselves. When the winter stretches into spring and the hailstorm destroys the sprouting crops, the man has nothing to sell. For years, he has worked tirelessly from dawn until dusk, but he barely makes any money the year of the storm. While the farmer is forced to auction off his livestock to earn enough money for daily necessities, the corporate suits indulge in luxury. Similar to this scenario, Franz Kafka, author of "Before the Law," criticizes the socioeconomic injustice that leaves hard-working individuals scrambling while …show more content…

The inefficiencies that confronted Kafka were only one part of an endemically problematic apparatus, the confluence of civil law and administrative bureaucracy. ("The Deconstruction and Reification of Law in Franz Kafka’s 'Before the Law ' and the Trial")
Even more evident than the proletariat 's own actions, or lack of actions, is the bureaucratic helplessness that hinders the lower classes from rising up. High authority 's noncompliance to assist all individuals and create the classless system Marxists strive to implement is responsible for the socioeconomic segregation in both past and modern societies. Kafka, a victim of socioeconomic injustice himself, criticizes the aristocracy through the countryman 's eyes in "Before the

Show More
Related

  • Analysis of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis

    1748 Words  | 4 Pages

    Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis is so strikingly absurd that it has engendered countless essays dissecting every possible rational and irrational aspect of the book. One such essay is entitled "Kafka's Obscurity" by Ralph Freedman in which he delves down into the pages of The Metamorphosis and ferrets out the esoteric aspects of Kafka's writing. Freedman postulates that Gregor Samsa progresses through several transformations: a transformation of spatial relations, a transformation of time, and a transformation of self consciousness, with his conscious mutation having an antithetical effect on the family opposite to that of Gregor. His conjectures are, for the most part, fairly accurate; Gregor devolves in both his spatial awareness and his consciousness. However, Freedman also asserts that after Gregor's father throws the wounding apple, Gregor loses his sense of time. While his hypothesis certainly appears erudite and insightful, there really is no evidence within the book itself to determine whether if Gregor has a deteriorating sense of time. If Freedman had only written about Gregor's spatial and conscious degradation, then his entire thesis would be accurate.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Barbara Ehrenreich's Article Analysis: Trouble With The Super-Poor

    1108 Words  | 3 Pages

    Year’s ago, mention of this widening gap between the privileged and the struggling was considered “Marxist”, but now the facts are too evident to be blamed on a belief. The richer continue to get richer and the poorer get poorer; due to the fact that, the wealthy pay the labor working majority unfair wages. Ironically, this “supreme” group makes their fortune because of these under paid people. For example, Walmart a low paying corporation owned by the wealthiest family in America. As previously stated, the success of the upper class is at the expense of the lower class and we see this in more ways then one: late fees and rates are collected by the rich, Realestate is bought up by them, and they have control of politics. The solution seen most fit by Ehrenreich and Lowenstein would be to remove the classes and have an egalitarian

    Read More

  • Mead And Marx's View On Human Nature

    1311 Words  | 3 Pages

    Marx believes there is a true human nature, that of a free species being, but our social environment can alienate us from it. To describe this nature, he first describes the class conflict between the bourgeois and the proletariats. Coined by Marx, the bourgeois are “the exploiting and ruling class.”, and the proletariats are “the exploited and oppressed class” (Marx, 207). These two classes are separated because of the machine we call capitalism. Capitalism arises from private property, specialization of labor, wage labor, and inevitably causes competition.

    Read More

  • Summary Of Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto

    1000 Words  | 2 Pages

    They were able to take advantage of the growing technology and exploration to advance out of the middle class and become extremely rich. Through their wealth, the bourgeois were able to gain an enormous amount of influence in society. For example, they have “exclusive political sway” (Marx 18). In other words, the state exists entirely to serve the needs of the bourgeois. However, even more importantly so, their existence is bringing about a gradual disintegration of sentiment and true relations. People are now measured by the amount of material goods they own. Therefore, doctors, lawyers, and other originally honest occupations have become based entirely on wages and familial relationships no longer exist. They have instead been replaced by purely money relations. The bourgeois are also constantly exploiting the lower classes, otherwise known as the proletarians. (Marx

    Read More

  • Marxism Vs Mercantilism

    198 Words  | 1 Pages

    Even now it is easy to see a division of society between the haves and have not’s. Marx saw this division throughout history as well. In Rome’s slave society, there was conflict between the slaves and those who were

    Read More

  • Free Essays on Kafka's Metamorphosis: A Response to Kafka

    619 Words  | 2 Pages

    as a form of hired help since he had taken the job to pay for his

    Read More

  • Justice and Mercy in The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

    898 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the transformation of the character Gregor from a man to one of the most hated insects, a vermin, may seem exaggerated and ridiculous, becoming more so over the course of the story the action builds and the emotions and ideas of the characters in the story begin to change and become more prominent. Kafka’s intention, however, is to expose and explore the impoverishment of human psychology with respect to the ways in which changes in one’s circumstances and conditions reshape notions people have of the way they believe in justice and mercy which will be explore further in this analysis of Gregor Samsa.

    Read More

  • Wealth and Poverty: Karl Marx

    1702 Words  | 4 Pages

    Karl Marx, a German philosopher, saw this inequality growing between what he called "the bourgeoisie" and "the proletariat" classes. The bourgeoisie was the middle/upper class which was growing in due to the industrial revolution, and the proletariats were the working class, the poor. These two classes set themselves apart by many different factors. Marx saw five big problems that set the proletariat and the bourgeoisie apart from each other. These five problems were: The dominance of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, the ownership of private property, the set-up of the family, the level of education, and their influence in government.

    Read More

  • Marxist Lens Analysis of Kafka's Metamorphosis

    1307 Words  | 3 Pages

    Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is a novella that follows the story of Gregor Samsa who, one day, wakes up as an insect. On the surface, it’s just a story about a man who’s transformed into a bug; but, when deeper analyzed, you come to understand that it’s a about a man who was always a bug conflicted by his identity in a class struggle between what is known as the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Kafka’s work was written in a time in history when the struggles between the classes were becoming more defined due to the rise of industrialization and other changing social structures. This story can best be interpreted though a Marxist lens. In Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, his Marxist ideology comes through in the way the characters represent the struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie classes during the turn of the century.

    Read More

  • Franz Kafka

    954 Words  | 2 Pages

    Franz Kafka, b. Prague, Bohemia (then belonging to Austria), July 3, 1883, d. June 3, 1924, has come to be one of the most influential writers of this century. Virtually unknown during his lifetime, the works of Kafka have since been recognized as symbolizing modern man's anxiety-ridden and grotesque alienation in an unintelligible, hostile, or indifferent world. Kafka came from a middle-class Jewish family and grew up in the shadow of his domineering shopkeeper father, who impressed Kafka as an awesome patriarch. The feeling of impotence, even in his rebellion, was a syndrome that became a pervasive theme in his fiction. Kafka did well in the prestigious German high school in Prague and went on to receive a law degree in 1906. This allowed him to secure a livelihood that gave him time for writing, which he regarded as the essence--both blessing and curse--of his life. He soon found a position in the semipublic Workers' Accident Insurance institution, where he remained a loyal and successful employee until--beginning in 1917-- tuberculosis forced him to take repeated sick leaves and finally, in 1922, to retire. Kafka spent half his time after 1917 in sanatoriums and health resorts, his tuberculosis of the lungs finally spreading to the larynx.

    Read More

  • Kuyper Against Marx

    1801 Words  | 4 Pages

    In Marx’s opinion, the cause of poverty has always been due to the struggle between social classes, with one class keeping its power by suppressing the other classes. He claims the opposing forces of the Industrial Age are the bourgeois and the proletarians. Marx describes the bourgeois as a middle class drunk on power. The bourgeois are the controllers of industrialization, the owners of the factories that abuse their workers and strip all human dignity away from them for pennies. Industry, Marx says, has made the proletariat working class only a tool for increasing the wealth of the bourgeoisie. Because the aim of the bourgeoisie is to increase their trade and wealth, it is necessary to exploit the worker to maximize profit. This, according to Marx, is why the labor of the proletariat continued to steadily increase while the wages of the proletariat continued to steadily decrease.

    Read More

  • Analysis of Franz Kafka's The Judgement

    1600 Words  | 4 Pages

    Neumann, Gerhard. "The Judgement, Letter to His Father, and the Bourgeois Family." Trans. Stanley Corngold. Reading Kafka. Ed. Mark Anderson. New York: Schocken, 1989. 215-28.

    Read More

  • The Theme of Freedom in Kafka's Metamorphosis

    1311 Words  | 3 Pages

    Pawel, Ernst. A Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. 2nd ed. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1984.

    Read More

  • God is Potrayed as Law in Before the Law by Franz Kafka

    1194 Words  | 3 Pages

    Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is often referred to as a parable. Thus, it is logical to approach Kafka’s work as an allegory and search for the deeper meaning underneath the story. We can then try to uncover the identity of the characters; of the gatekeeper, the man from the country, and the Law and subsequently relating them to something that fits the example of the plot; a man’s confused search for god, a man’s quest for happiness but never accomplishing it, a academic’s quest for recognition which never comes. Any given number of innovative readers...

    Read More

  • Confronting Guilt In Franz Kafka’s The Trial

    1287 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Josef K. is guilty; his crime is that he does not accept his own humanity. This crime is not obvious throughout the novel, but rather becomes gradually and implicitly apparent to the reader. Again and again, despite his own doubts and various shortcomings, K. denies his guilt, which is, in essence, to deny his very humanity. It is for this crime that the Law seeks him, for if he would only accept the guilt inherent in being human (and, by so doing, his humanity itself), both he and the Law could move on.

    Read More

More about Analysis Of Franz Kafka's Before The Law

Open Document