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.