https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i2.072
Kafka: Existential Collapse and Breakdown of Selfhood
MS NAVNEET KAUR
PhD Research Scholar
Sant Baba Bhag Singh University, Jalandhar, Punjab
DR. RAMEEZ AHMAD BHAT
Assistant Professor
Sant Baba Bhag Singh University, Jalandhar, Punjab
Abstract: Franz Kafka’s writing contains one of the most rigorous literary explorations of existential collapse and the dissolution of selfhood in modern literature. This essay examines The Metamorphosis (1915), The Trial (1925), and The Castle (1926) as narratives structured around existential shifts—moments when identity destabilises, agency erodes, and the subject becomes alienated from the body, society, and meaning itself. Drawing on Kafka’s Diaries and Letters to His Father, as well as major critical interpretations by Theodor W. Adorno, Stanley Corngold, Walter Sokel, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Harold Bloom, Albert Camus, and Gershom Scholem, the article contends that Kafka’s protagonists experience a gradual countdown to collapse rather than a sudden catastrophe. These works depict the internalisation of authority, internalisation of guilt into an ontological condition, and the impossibility of cohesive selfhood within bureaucratic modernity.
Keywords: Existentialism, Breakdown of selfhood, Alienation, Guilt, selfhood, Bureaucracy
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