Franz Kafka's Before The Law

Written by Heinrich von Kleist in 1810, ‘Michael Kohlhaas’ depicts the story of a man who greatly values the virtue of justice. Throughout the text, one witnesses the transformation of the protagonist from a reasonable man who accepts the lawful procedures to an aggressive character who overly lives by his virtue to an extent where he is willing to take any measures to promote public justice. Franz Kafka’s parable ‘Before the law,’ whilst touching upon similar values of the law outlined in ‘Michael Kohlhaas,’ on the other hand, introduces the account of a more reserved man from a countryside who struggles to gain entry to the law. In fact, when one closely scrutinizes these texts, there are numerous comparisons as well as contrasts that one can elicit. But it is precisely this process of carefully analyzing these stories, drawing out both similar and disparate qualities, which allows this dissertation to encourage the reader to consider the futility of the human beings within a legal framework.

The futility of human being is plain to see, one such implication through our inability to pronounce individual authority. In Kafka’s “Before the law,” the man from the country is a reticent character who

Likewise, the doorkeeper, though a subject of such universality, is a mere individual in the grand scheme of law. That is, “the parable itself…makes the point clearly…that the doorkeeper guards a law that is inaccessible even to him, and that he has not authority that is not in a real sense given to him by the actions, assumptions, and expectations of man from the country.” In Kafka’s parable, there is an equilibrium between an individual as a subject of the universality of the law and as a mere singular individual in a collective