Kafka and Existential Literature: From Metamorphosis to The Trial
The adjective “Kafkaesque” is used so widely today that few remember the writer standing behind it—a man who spent his days turning the pages of files on injured workers at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Office in Prague and at night wrote stories in his notebooks. Franz Kafka never called himself an existentialist; he died in 1924, years before the term took on its modern meaning. Yet if we trace the literary roots of concepts such as alienation, guilt without a crime, terrifying freedom, and unprotected responsibility, we arrive at those same three unfinished novels and a handful of short stories.
Thirty Years Before Sartre and Camus
The chronology is simple but illuminating. “The Metamorphosis” was written in the autumn of 1912; Sartre’s Being and Nothingness was published in 1943, and Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus a year earlier. In this interval, what took shape in philosophy as a concept already existed in Kafka’s fiction as a scene. He lived in Prague, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire: a German-speaking Jew among Czechs, an employee of an insurance institution, and the son of a father who, in front of his eyes, called his theater friend an “insect.” This lived situation did not become a treatise; it became an image.
The Metamorphosis: The Problem Is Not the Cause, but the Consequence
The narrative begins with one of the most famous sentences in literary history: Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find himself a gigantic insect. Kafka never says why. The German word he uses, Ungeziefer, is not the name of any specific insect; it roughly means “unwanted creature.” This very ambiguity is the core of the work: the question of nature recedes to the margins, and the question of relationship takes center stage.
Even before the metamorphosis, Samsa was nothing but his roles: a traveling salesman, the family breadwinner, the guarantor of his father’s debt. After the metamorphosis, instead of mourning, the family turns to crisis management: the room is locked, food is delivered, the lodgers arrive. Grete, the sister who has cared for him for months, says at the end that they must get rid of him; in a few pages Kafka shows that a person is human only as long as he is useful. Sadegh Hedayat’s Persian translation of “The Metamorphosis” is one of the earliest and most enduring introductions of Kafka to our literature, and this short text became the gateway to him.
The Trial: To Be Condemned, No Crime Is Necessary
The novel begins with a baseless accusation: someone had falsely accused Josef K., even though he had done nothing wrong. Officials come, interrogate him, and then release him back into the ordinary course of his daily life; the court is held in attic rooms. The deepest part of the book, however, lies not in the account of the trial but in the parable “Before the Law”: a man from the country spends his whole life waiting before a door at which a guard stands, and in the end he hears that this door was only for you, and now I am closing it.
Kafka inverts morality: guilt is not the result of something we have done but the condition in which we live. “Responsibility” begins precisely where K. finally accepts that he is condemned, without knowing for what. The irony is that before his death Kafka asked Max Brod to burn his manuscripts, but his friend did not obey; it was one person’s choice that delivered “The Trial” and “The Castle” to us.
Four Existential Questions in Kafka’s World
The following table is a good starting point for categorizing these concepts:
| Concept | Reflection in Kafka’s Works | Concrete Example |
|---|---|---|
| Alienation | The individual is separated from their own body and roles | Gregor Samsa in “The Metamorphosis” |
| Guilt Without a Crime | Accusation precedes the existence of any crime | Josef K. in “The Trial” |
| Freedom and Choice | Not choosing is itself a choice | The man from the country in “Before the Law” |
| Absurdity and Hope | The endless search remains without result | The land surveyor in “The Castle” |
Kafka, Sartre, Camus: A Shared Question, Different Answers
In the play “The Flies,” Sartre compels Orestes to accept his freedom and shoulder his responsibility; a hero who chooses knowingly. Kafka’s heroes lack such clarity. Josef K. does not know until the last page what he is facing, and instead of rebelling, he remains waiting. Camus had felt this difference too; in the appendix to “The Myth of Sisyphus,” he calls Kafka the writer of “hopeless hope,” someone who sees the world as absurd but does not stop asking. The hero of his “The Stranger,” Meursault, with his sunny atmosphere, is a distant relative of Josef K. in damp corridors.
In Europe, however, this influence did not last. Gabriel García Márquez recounts that reading “The Metamorphosis” showed him there was a way in which nothing is explained and everything is believable; a door that opened onto “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” It is from this point that Kafka turns from an unknown clerk in Prague into a turning point in twentieth-century narrative.
“Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.” — Franz Kafka
Conclusion: Practice, Not Diagnosis
Reading Kafka is a practice, not a diagnosis; he offers no solutions and does not even put the problem in order. If we take his technique — the removal of cause, the deferral of meaning, and the construction of a question that never closes — it becomes clear why successive generations of writers, from Beckett to Kundera and Murakami, keep returning to him. “The Metamorphosis” and “The Trial” are two stations on a single path: one of losing the body, the other of losing innocence. And at the end of both, the only one who remains is the reader; the one who must decide whether to carry these unanswered questions with them or leave them behind on that very last page.
