Kafkaesque and the Modern, Alienated Condition

The term Kafkaesque is often merely used to connote notions of the surreal, such as the state of Gregor Samsa in the German author's most famous short story of a "Metamorphosis" that a clerk undergoes into a hideous, human-sized insect. Yet Kafka is more than the Salvador Dali of prose. Rather, the outer conditions of Kafka's most famous protagonists become symbolic of the human condition of modernity as a whole -- even before his physical regression into a primitive stage of life, Samsa lives his entire existence in a tiny room, giving all of his wages to his decrepit parents and ungrateful aspiring singer of a sister. His family ends the story relieved at the passing of their invalid son and brother when he can no longer provide for them.

On the day he turns into an insect, Gregor has such a little sense of self and of what is truly important, he is more concerned with getting ready for work than the fact that his body has become altered. Thus, notions of what is Kafkaesque is not merely what is strange, but also what is enclosed and reflective of the confining and soul-destroying physical, mental, and emotional conditions of modern life. Kafka's protagonist in "The Hunger Artist" starves and is gawked at because he has lost his appetite in a world glutted on sensation. Those people who watch the artist at the carnivals he purveys his talents at, eat empty and stultifying food rather than anything of real sustenance. But the Hunger Artist admits he would have enjoyed even this kind of food, could he have found something he really liked to stuff himself with. His abstention is not evidence of moral superiority, merely of ennui.

Thus, Kafka's bored, trapped, and spiritually depleted protagonists are uniquely modern in their characterization and construction because their condition highlights the alienated quality of human life in a world where religion and older forms of morals have lost their significance, only to have been replaced by commodities such as doughy food and cheap song. In such a world human beings live as strangers to their own appetites, bodies, as well as to their own families. Locked in fragmented ideological enclaves of such intense interiority, they become obsessed with trivia, like bugs and hunger, band become strangers to themselves.