I Kafka It

Franz Kafka was a predominant writer during his time by writing nearly 16 novels. He mainly focused on the oppression of bureaucracy and societies norms. This style and topic of writing closely relates to the Gothic themes of resisting empire and struggling to obtain individual importance. A peice Kafka wrote called "The Castle" displays the Gothic aesthetic of hopelessness that people feel when faced with bureaucracy or the empire because the main character K always hits a roadblock while trying to get to "The Castle". Kafka also represented the Gothic ideas of madness and death of individualism with his peice called "The Judgement". In it Georg eventually ends up going mad and jumps into a river which can be interpreted as losing his individualism. These ideas that Kafka wrote about help my understanding of the Gothic by giving me metaphorical context of what the Gothic aesthetic looks like in writing. Also by writing these two novels Kafka shows just the method by which one can actually feel oppressed within a somewhat moderate context and also helped me understand some of the political fears that were attached to the Gothic aesthetic during his time.