Blog Post #1: Kafka's "Before the Law"

     The story, “Before the Law,” by Franz Kafka narrates the conversation between a man, who seeks to gain entry into the law, and the gatekeeper, who guards the law and refuses to allow the man to enter. While there are several lenses through which we can read this story, our group decided that the Marxist critical approach is the most useful critical style to analyze the text and interpret its meaning. As although the story’s open-ended plot makes it possible to utilize the reader-response approach, the Marxist approach is most convincing when addressing the story’s primary focus on the difference in power between social classes.

     Our group pointed to the several instances wherein the depicted class struggle and a hierarchical society fittingly aligned with the Marxist critical style’s primary tenet that “socioeconomic forces (...) affect people’s lives” (Gardner 170). In the story for example, the gatekeeper, despite repeated requests, constantly denies the man access to the law. This relationship between the gatekeeper and man shows how the gatekeeper, who is of a higher socioeconomic class, asserts his power over the man “from the country” (Kafka), mirroring the relationship of an oppressive regime exerting complete control over the common citizen. The man struggles to rise up and enter the law, however is never allowed to by the powerful gatekeeper. Furthermore, the inequality between the gatekeeper and the man is highlighted as the gatekeeper is shown to remain powerful and healthy throughout the plot as the man ages. The man’s aging reflects the Marxist idea of reification, “the process whereby oppressed workers lose their individual sense of humanity” (Gardner 170). In this case, the man’s gradual loss of eyesight, hearing, strength, and eventually death parallels this idea that when a subject is in a constant state of oppression, his or her identity as an individual human being will fade. In addition to the relationship between the gatekeeper and the man, the gatekeepers themselves have a strict hierarchy, as “from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other” (Kafka). The extent of the difference in power is emphasized as the first gatekeeper says that he “can’t endure even one glimpse of the third” (Kafka). This hierarchy in which the different levels of the guards drastically affects the power he possesses reflects the stratified class structure that is a focal point of the Marxist critical style.

     As the Marxist critical style was deemed the best approach with which to analyze this text by our group, the use of the reader-response theory also has some merit due to the ambiguous nature of the story. The reader-response theory views a text by analyzing how different readers, from various backgrounds and time periods, would “make meaning of the words on the page” (Gardner 175). In this story, different readers may have distinct interpretations of what it means to “enter the law” due to Kafka’s unclear definition of what the “law” is. For instance, one may view “entry into the law” to mean access to basic rights such as voting or fair trial. Another interpretation could be that the man seeking to enter the law actually desires to be above the law, and that the gatekeeper is an officer who prevents the man from doing so in order to protect the law. These interpretations are the “gaps” associated with reader-response criticism, which are the “things that the text doesn’t tell us, that we need to fill in and work out for ourselves" (Gardner 175). Furthermore, the reader-response theory analyzes how the process by which a reader interprets a text is affected by his or her background and time period. For example, a modern day reader living in a democratic society would view “entering the law” as access to the government. A law student may choose to see the story as a man trying to pass the bar to become a lawyer. Likewise, a symbolist may choose to see the man waiting by the gates for years to be a symbolic representation of time passing, as opposed to interpreting it in the literal sense.

     Ultimately, both schools of critical style can be useful in analyzing this story. The reader-response theory is valid due to the extent with which the text is open to interpretation. However, the Marxist approach is more convincing for this text because the entire plot revolves around political and socioeconomic relationships. Moreover, while there are several interpretations of this text that give the reader-response theory some merit, many of these possible interpretations are still political in nature and have an underlying theme that relates to the Marxist style’s ideologies. This is because the idea of what the “law” in this story is open to interpretation, the story at its core is still about how this law affects two characters of two different standings in society. Therefore, I argue that the Marxist approach is best suited for this text due to its emphasis on the distinction between men of different hierarchical classes and how those in a high class have greater power than those in a lower class.

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