Tuesday, August 28, 2012

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.

1 comment:

  1. Very good! Most people miss the tree at the beginning in their analysis. Well done!

    -Ms Bommarito

    ReplyDelete