Kafka's "Before the Law" cont.

After reading the selections from Existentialism and Human Emotions and Nausea, I went back to take a closer look at Kafka's story Before the Law as well as the game adaptation of Before the Law. I was primarily looking for certain elements that would directly relate to the game ending and/or change the flavor of the story.

The first thing I noticed was how the man in the game starts under a tree. I was unable to ignore the significance of the tree because of how thoroughly it was beaten into my head in the passage from Nausea. Instead of the tree being a simple element of the game, like the grass, it became truly alive. It was there. It existed. The tree was no longer part of the landscape; it was now a piece of the story. After all, if the gate was there only for the man, and the gatekeeper was also only there because of the man, then why should the tree have not only grown just for the man?

If the tree is taken as a metaphor for food, abundance or vitality, then the man must walk away from these things to embrace his quest for the law. He must take risks. Once I began to think about this, I realized that I must be correct because as the man approaches the law, he walks by rubble and eventually has to traverse the most unstable terrain imaginable just to get to the law. To me this symbolized that the path will always get harder, but one must persevere.

Now, for the technical Existentialism part. The story and the game can both be read with Existentialism in a similar manner. Both of them boil down to one individual point: a choice. The choice to either wait, or throw caution to the wind in search of what you believe in. On one hand, it could be argued that the story is over-simplified through the conversion to the game. That is not what I believe. I now view the game as a wonderful and necessary simplification to a story that may have otherwise been confused by a casual reader. The story is trying to say what the game more elegantly states: Life is a choice. That is what it really comes down to. You can choose to do, or not to do. You may further yourself, or you may stop. Ultimately, you ARE what you choose.

Kafka's "Before the Law"

There are many metaphors buried away in Kafka's "Before the Law." When I first read the story, I was first struck by the callous manner of the gatekeeper. He had a deceiving personality that would apparently tell any lie or use any trick to prevent the man from pursuing the law. This was a deep element of the story to me. Had the gatekeeper remained silent, or not lied about the other gatekeepers existing, there is a much higher chance that the man would have gone straight toward the law. I felt like this three-dimensional feel to the gatekeeper was lost when the story was converted to the game. I didn't feel threatened by the gatekeeper in the game at all.

The game was definitely a simple imagining of the story. The first ending to the game matched up with the story pretty well. However, the second ending was completely new material added by the creator of the game. While I agree with the way the man in the game may walk right past the gatekeeper unharmed, I feel like the content of the game added at the end completely changed the air of finality that the story had. The reason the story worked for me, as a reader, was that it was short, concise and definite. There was no air of ambiguity at the end. When I finished the game, it made me go back and reconsider what I had originally thought to be a rather elegant piece of literature. The fact that the book not only gave the man zero answers, but was in fact completely blank, raised many more questions than it solved.

My initial reaction to the ending of the game was that the man's search had been in vain. He traveled and searched for the law, only to be disappointed by a blank book once he finally managed to defeat the seemingly only obstacle in his way. Then, all of a sudden, that didn't seem quite right. Just because the book is blank does not necessarily mean that he has searched for something that does not exist. It may have been a cosmic way of telling the man that what he is searching for is within himself. Or, it could possibly have been a blank canvas for him to now write the law in a way he saw fit. Another possibility, while slightly more abstract, is that the empty book was not actually empty until he broke the law by walking into the arches instead of trying to find the proper answer for the riddle posed to him by the gatekeeper.