His tragicomic stories act as a form of mythology for the modern industrial age, employing dream logic to explore the relationships between systems of arbitrary power and the individuals caught up in them. It’s not the absurdity of bureaucracy alone, but the irony of the character’s circular reasoning in reaction to it, that is emblematic of Kafka’s writing. This story, Tavlin argues, “contains all of the elements that make for a truly Kafkaesque scenario.” In truth, he is “a prisoner of his own ego,” unwilling to delegate because he sees his underlings as unworthy of the task. Tavlin references Kafka’s short story “Poseiden,” in which the god of the sea can neither explore nor enjoy his realm because he is buried under mountains of paperwork.

Kafkaesque has become evocative of all “unnecessarily complicated and frustrating experiences, like being forced to navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy.”īut the word is much richer than such casual usage as describing a trip to the DMV. He begins with a brief summary of Kafka’s novel The Trial, in which “K, the protagonist, is arrested out of nowhere and made to go through a bewildering process where neither the cause of his arrest nor the nature of the judicial proceedings are made clear to him.” The scenario is “considered so characteristic of Kafka’s work” that scholars use the term “Kafkaesque” to describe it. Tavlin returns in the video above to explain the meaning of “Kafkaesque,” a less-abused descriptor but one we still may not fully appreciate.

Kafkaesque by Franz Kafka