Before the Law there stands a gatekeeper. And to this gatekeeper comes a man from the country and asks for entry into the Law.
But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry. The man thinks for a moment and then asks whether he will be able to enter later on. Be warned, though: I am mighty. And I am but the lowest of the gatekeepers. From each hall to the next there are gatekeepers, each one mightier than before. By the third one I cannot even bear his sight. Surely the Law, he thinks, ought to be accessible to all people and at all times. The gatekeeper gives him a little stool and lets him set himself down on the side by the door.
He sits there for days and then years. He makes many efforts to be let in and tires the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper every-so-often engages to give him little interrogations, where he asks the man about his homeland and about plenty of other things.
But they are lifeless questions, however, of the sort that great men ask, and in the end he tells him once more that he still cannot let him in. The man, who had prepared a great deal for his journey, uses everything he has, whether valuable or not, in order to bribe the gatekeeper. He forgets about the other gatekeepers, so that this one seems to him the only obstacle preventing him from entering the Law.
He curses his misfortune, at first heedlessly and loudly; then, as he grows older, he just mutters to himself. At last his sight grows weak and he is unable to tell whether it is really getting darker, or if it is just his eyes deceiving him. He does recognise well, however, a radiance shining forth in the dark, one that escapes inextinguishably from the door into the Law. Now he has little time left to live. Before his death all the experiences of the whole time gather themselves inside his head into a single question, which he had hitherto not asked the gatekeeper.
He beckons to him, for now he can no longer hold his head up straight. The gatekeeper has to bend himself deeply to lower himself down to him, since the height difference between them has greatly changed to the disadvantage of the man. This entrance was destined only for you. They may exhaust all their resources to become one, such as spending time and money to become a lawyer first.
Afterwards, they may go onto practice for many years as a lawyer hoping that one day they will become a judge. That individual may do everything in their power that is needed, but not get onto the bench. However, all the effort did not go to waste. They were still able to accomplish the first step, which was becoming a lawyer. On the other hand, giving items to the gatekeeper can also be seen as bribery. In life sometimes we as humans want to try and make problems go away quickly, in this case the problem was getting past the gatekeeper.
The best way was seen as giving stuff to the gatekeeper, which can also be seen as bribery. The man thought that if he gave items to the gatekeeper, it may cause the gatekeeper to slip up and let the man go past the gate Kafka, Although it can be seen as though Kafka is telling readers to try anything and everything to get to their goals so they do not have to feel like failures.
It can also be seen as saying to try bribery. Officials and authority figures may be corrupt, and they may take bribes from individuals who are trying to get ahead in life without having to wait or go around obstacles. This man went on a journey to try and understand the law, and to try and get a sense of guidance and purpose.
When he failed to do so, due to him getting old and dying, the gatekeeper closed the entrance that was made specifically for him Kafka, This shows how everyone has their own journey in life, they make their own paths and they try and find their own sense of guidance. Some people turn to the law, they look at the rules and regulations, which have been set in place and try to understand what is going on and why things are the way they are. There are many people who try and understand the law and who at the same time try and make changes to it.
People may try for years and years to make changes that may not be possible to make. There are implications to this parable. It is inaccessible; individuals are subject to the law even if they do not know the foundations of it Comack, The man however, has the option of disobeying the gatekeeper and just going in. However, he chose not to, this shows the relationship between authority and law. We can also see how the man does not enter even though the gatekeeper is not stopping him.
This shows the method of legal positivism, which focuses on facts and not the values Comack, There is also a social contract which can be seen. The man has given all his trust to the authority figure the gatekeeper and abides what he says as he believes the gatekeeper is trustworthy. As bad as the man wants to go in, he believes that the gatekeeper will eventually let him in Kafka, At the same time this parable shows a relationship, which is lifelong and constant.
Many people struggle to understand the law. There is plenty of confusion and doubt around it as it is not always easy to grasp and understand Wais, While at the same time there are people in place who get to decide how the law should be and not everyone is given the chance to give their opinions and ideas. As we get older we come to seek purpose and some sort of order in our lives, especially when things are in chaos Wais, However, understanding parables is not as simple as reading it and arriving at the meaning instantly.
We have psychological obstacles in our way, whether this be our feeling of intimidation of the parable or fear of interpreting it incorrectly and waiting for someone to tell us how to approach it, Kafka specifically writes to emphasize the lack of a physical barrier, describing the doorkeeper as only standing to the side and not directly in front of the gate. Most importantly, in the last scene, Kafka discourages our persistent and unwavering motivation to find meaning in parables, where we see ourselves, represented as the man in the parable who ends up wasting his life trying to gain access to the law.
Not only does he end up dying, but also dies without the knowledge of what lies beyond the gate. Thus, according to Kafka, we should give up trying to understand the parable lest we end up having, metaphorically, the same fate as the man in the parable. However, the paradoxical nature of this interpretation is that if we had not tried to understand the parable in the first place, we would have never understood his argument.
It appears that we have been drawn into a never-ending cycle of circular logic because we cannot support the uninterpretable nature of the parable with an interpretation of the parable. The absurdity of the parable itself seems to even have the capability to disable our ability to prove that his parable is a parable on the absurdity of parables, and this is precisely the point.
This reveals that even when we make potentially accurate statements about the nature of this parable we still cannot completely pin down the meaning. This then becomes the tenor, the experience of absurdity, of not knowing, and the entire parable itself becomes the vehicle for the tenor. Even now, we cannot escape this paradoxical interpretation that Kafka has brought us to. Kafka, Franz.
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