![]() The man from the country retrogresses, his vision becoming ever more myopic, which is beautifully expressed in his dwindling eyesight. There he spends the better part of his life, and it becomes obvious that Kafka is here, among other things, also portraying a complex mental process.Īs the years pass, the man from the country develops the idée fixe that the man supposedly keepmg him away from the Law is the only obstacle. Quite the contrary: he offers the man from the country a chair by the entrance. The doorkeeper is not described as inhuman. His fixation on these irrelevant details mounts, rendering him ever more incapable of acting on his own. More and more he becomes attracted by the doorkeeper's face, his beard, and even the fleas in his fur coat. His aim having been thwarted (this, anyway, is what he thinks has happened), he gradually loses interest in it and permits himself to be distracted. The doorkeeper's statements that he is "powerful" and "only the lowest doorkeeper" intimidate the man from the country enough to prevent his asking any further questions, much less his trying to enter. The answer he receives to his second, less relevant, question - whether he will be permitted to enter later - is vague, so vague that it reinforces his already strong hesitancy to act. Rather than insisting on clarifying this first essential item, he yields to pressure that at first does not manifest itself as such. Kafka's all-pervading pattern begins to assume contours already: the man from the country has a fatal way of giving away the advantage of initiative. ![]() It is astounding that the question he immediately asks is not why he is being denied admission now but, rather, whether perhaps he might be allowed to enter later. The man from the country, who has not expected "to run into any great troubles," suddenly learns at the door to the Law that he cannot gain admission now. We will revert to this point after dealing with it in detail. Upon reading the parable, we sense that it mixes concrete and abstract images, that it is an artistic attempt at expressing the basically inexpressible. remarks that the "knight could have been meant to stand guard." The picture brings to mind the doorkeeper of the parable "Before the Law," when K. We have dealt with it before in the form of desire and immediate deprivation here, it is hesitancy that keeps him from following up his intention of looking at it more clearly. ![]() It was surprising that he did not go nearer." An underlying pattern of Kafka's world, a combination of strong intentionality and absence of motion, becomes visible here. Note, too, that one of the pictures shows a knight who "seemed to watch an event carefully which went on before his eyes. This is important because Kafka's proverbial love of Prague has been used to argue for the arrangement of Chapter 9 as the culmination point immediately before the final chapter. Vitus Cathedral, under whose Gothic spires Kafka grew up. The cathedral, by the way, is Prague's fourteenth-century St. notices a picture and scans it with his flashlight. While waiting for his visitor in the cathedral, K. As far as the structure of the novel goes, Kafka uses this connection to demonstrate one more time how utterly inseparable K.'s world of the Bank is from that of his case. as a guide for an Italian visitor because he speaks the language and is knowledgeable about art.
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