Karl’s sense of conscription is expressed by the physical “embraces” he receives from people he encounters.

Robinson warns Karl that “this isn’t service here, it’s slavery.” One regime is swiftly exchanged for another, as Karl moves on to work for a despotic, obese woman named Brunelda, who is Delamarche’s mistress. In the town of Ramses, Karl becomes “the lowest and most dispensable employee in the enormous hierarchy of the hotel’s domestics.” The work is grueling, and the exhaustion it produces in Karl compounds his sense of alienation: “After a twelve-hour shift, coming off duty at six o’clock in the morning, he was so weary that he went straight to bed without heeding anyone.” Karl does, however, befriend a young secretary named Therese, but after being falsely accused of thievery, Karl is once again dismissed.

Pollunder’s country house, Karl feels oppressed by its “endless corridors, the chapel, the empty rooms, the darkness everywhere” and by Pollunder’s daughter Clara, who attempts to seduce him.Įventually expelled by his uncle for breaking curfew, Karl travels deeper into the country and hooks up with two scoundrels, Robinson and Delamarche. Effectively imprisoned in his room, he is governed by his uncle, who “frowned with annoyance if he ever found Karl out on the balcony.” When the pair visit Mr. But despite his preconceived idealization of America and the luxurious accommodation at his uncle’s home, Karl becomes increasingly claustrophobic. Upon his arrival and serendipitous encounter with his Uncle Jacob, Karl feels relatively positive about his new environment. Karl’s attempts to gain a foothold in an alien, incomprehensible country are perpetually stymied by various restrictive scenarios and domineering personalities.Īmerica is represented as alternately emancipatory and confining. Kafka’s narrative depicts the inconclusive struggle of a young man named Karl Rossman who ventures to the United States in order to escape a pregnancy scandal in his homeland. Kafka never crossed the Atlantic to America, and much of his knowledge of the New World was drawn from family lore and writings by Charles Dickens (who wrote of his travels in the United States) and the fantasist Karl May. The Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924) wrote Amerika between 19, but the novel was not published until 1927, several years after the author’s death.

Amerika by kafka