Date of Award
Spring 2025
Language
English
Embargo Period
5-7-2025
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
College/School/Department
Department of English
Program
English
First Advisor
Jeffrey Berman
Second Advisor
Vesna Kuiken
Committee Members
Ineke Murakami
Keywords
franz kafka, absurdism, COVID-19, Marxism, disability theory
Subject Categories
English Language and Literature
Abstract
No word better encapsulates the confusion and inequality proliferating in the post-2020 global world than “absurd.” Absurdity consumes the way we interact with one another, going about life-as-usual in pocket worlds in which the individual is alienated from both oneself and others. Life is defined by a series of problems that regularly go ignored by both institution and general populace alike, but not by the human body: the effects of sustained illness and reinfection by recurrent viruses in a world that no longer acknowledges their severity nor their pervasiveness nor steps we may take towards personal safety. Daily life has resumed its “normal” rhythms for most, with former mask and vaccine mandates increasingly being relaxed, supplanted by a suspicion towards medical science, the masked, and a growing movement to ban face coverings and vaccines altogether. Contrary to this movement, the number of severe COVID-19 and other infectious disease cases has only increased since the end of enforced lockdowns.
The requirement for endless growth to fuel global capitalism creates an innate absurdity: the sacrifice of body, mind, and livelihood for the behest of profit, and human life is in turn translated into a sort of resource with which to keep the fires of industry and economic prosperity burning. Virtue can only be found in labor, and therefore those who cannot– or refuse to– participate in this labor are reviled.
Above all else in the “post-pandemic” world, the concept of “normalcy” reigns supreme. The citizen is expected to return to “work as normal,” the student is expected to “study as normal,” and businesses are expected to resume ordinary dates and hours of operation. Equipment used to keep the body safe– the vaccine, the mask, necessary quarantine– has collectively been discouraged and deemed less meaningful than the continued growth of capitalism, which in and of itself is unsustainable.
In turn, in a world of failing health and failing bureaucracy, the works of author Franz Kafka shine with renewed relevance: most significantly, his short stories “The Metamorphosis” and “The Trial,” which illustrate politics of bodies and minds that have been overrun with ideas about what it means to be a good citizen in an age with a senseless approach to the concept of the self. Josef K. attemps to follow the unnavigable Law set out for him to avoid imprisonment, and Gregor Samsa attempts to reenter his old world – the world of a businessman and family patriarch – after losing his humanity at random. Both works investigate contradictions present in our expectations of our governing systems, our governing systems’ expectations of us, and the ways in which those two expectations often defeat one another and leave grave implications for citizens who find the systems laid out in bureaucracy to be physically or intellectually unnavigable– which, Kafka argues through both narratives, is by design. Tying them together, we have the thought experiment present in the short story “Before the Law,” showing us a man waiting at a bureaucratic gate marked only for his entry to be processed until the moment of his death – his and his alone, yet there is never time for his concerns to be heard.
All four of these narratives, in turn, are suited to a Marxist re-interpretation in which they are analyzed through the lens of an alienating, absurdist simulacrum of normalcy– people being pressured to invest labor, understanding, and their physical selves into bureaucratic systems that are not just nonsensical, but nonsensical by design to distract from the fact that they do not fulfill their promises or stated purposes for the “average citizen” of their time.
Samsa is not rewarded for the hard work he has provided for his company nor the financial stability he has provided for his family, and K. is not given protection nor shelter by the law that is meant to guard his rights as a citizen. In both cases, bureaucracy treats them as a threat to its continued machine, and excises them like tumors from its body so that it may continue unimpeded. “Before the Law” describes a legal system that by its very nature cannot enforce anything, a vestigial set of symbols that indicate nothing and exist to force one to stay where he is, as he is, without gaining information about his circumstance.
I contribute to this collection my own interpretation: that the archetypes of K, Gregor Samsa, and the citizens present in “Before the Law” and “An Imperial Message” are analogous to modern-day citizens, failed by the current process of bureaucracy in a similar way to how citizens of Prague were failed in Kafka’s time by its own Law. The disabled and the accused suffer similarly, and even those who think themselves average working-class citizens could at any moment be the victim of incrimination or illness that takes away every aspect of life which they have been sure of up to this point.
At current, an “average citizen” is one who has experienced a Covid-19 infection. At current, an “average citizen” is someone whose health and future have been failed by one or more systems of bureaucracy in order to keep the decrepit corpse of “normal” moving and producing capital. We, as are Kafka’s protagonists, wading through the undeath of normalcy. What is to be done?
License
This work is licensed under the University at Albany Standard Author Agreement.
Recommended Citation
Lownie, Chris, "Kafka in the Plague Years: Reinterpreting Absurdity in the 2020s" (2025). Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present). 240.
https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/etd/240
