Stranger on Earth

The Übermeister  of alienation and paranoia shows us what it is like to be a man judged by the masses for no discernible reason in the uncompleted last novel America (1927). The novel may contain some of the most farcical passages in Franz Kafka’s entire oeuvre (the scene in Chapter 7 involving Karl being interrogated by a policeman and scrutinised by the entire neighbourhood is an apt example); but the oppressive Kafkaesque elements that have become so familiar to us through The Trial and The Castle can still be detected throughout lurking beneath the surface of the absurd comedy. America ’s protagonist Karl Rossmann is an immigrant left to his own fate. Through happenstance, he manages to secure himself a position as a lift-boy at the Hotel Occidental, where he attends to his duties as he has been instructed – only to be disrupted on one ill-timed occasion as his ruffian acquaintance Robinson drops by to borrow money. Karl leaves his station for a brief moment, ...

The psychological and intellectual preoccupations of the modern man have never been more confounding since the arrival of Kierkegaardian Existentialism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Today, there is the global village which brings all of us together but ensures that our differences keep us apart; there is the Internet that has transformed the world into a giant family, making us believe in the idealism of “six degrees of separation,” and yet we can feel desolate among 7 billion people and hunger for intimacy; there is the freedom of being an individual, of making your decisions based on your wants and needs, but you cannot seem to work out what it is you want or need. Modern living is mined with these frustrating challenges. The purpose of this piece is to look briefly at four landmark literary works – Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice , Franz Kafka’s The Trial , J.M.G. Le Clézio’s The Interrogation , Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood  – and convince the reader tha...