Blog Post #1 - Response to Prompt #1

In Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law,” the protagonist, a country man, seeks entry to the law but a gatekeeper keeps him from doing so. Although this story does not explicitly explain to the reader what “the law” is, one way of interpreting this story is that the law represents some sort of government or legal system and that the gatekeeper is an authority figure or professional that denies the country man from accessing it.

My group chose to analyze this reading through a Marxist approach. The Marxist criticism seemed like the most fitting approach at understanding this story because, as explained in the Gardner reading, it deals with class relations and structures of power. In “Before the Law,” there is a clear imbalance of power between the country man and the gatekeeper. It is specified in the story that the man is from the country. There is an implied social status that suggests the man is likely just a common man. The country man also believes that “the law should be accessible for everyone.” The man recognizes that legal systems and justice should be accessible to everyone regardless of status. The gatekeeper, however, who is described as being dressed in a fur coat, which could be seen as a sign of status, repeatedly denies entry to the man. The country man remains persistent until the end of his life, refusing to wait for the law to come to him, and seeking it out himself. By reading this story through a Marxist approach, we can expose the inequalities between the country man that seeks the law and the gatekeeper that prevents him from entering.

The Marxist approach is not a perfect fit, however. At the end of the story, the man eventually dies after spending years asking for entry to the law. Before he does die, however, the gatekeeper tells the country man that the entrance was “assigned only to [him.]” This ending complicated things in terms of the Marxist approach. By specifying that the gate is only for him, it creates an ending that is too individualized. Typically a Marxist criticism would show that a story is written for a society as opposed to a single person.

Another approach that could also be used to interpret the meaning of this story is the psychological approach. In this approach, instead of the law representing some form of government, it can be interpreted as one’s own success. In this approach, the gatekeeper (as well as each subsequent gatekeeper, considering he describes himself as “the most lowly gatekeeper”) may represent subconscious barriers that prevent the country man from achieving his own success. In the story, the law is seen as an almost sacred thing. As the man nears the end of his life, he sees the law as “an illumination.” As the man is dying, the gatekeeper tells the man that he is going to close the gate which shows that the gate is only there as a way of accessing this particular man’s success.