Franz Kafka's "Before the Law": A Marxist Perspective

            Franz Kafka’s short story “Before the Law” resembles something close to a parable with its few and nameless characters, a gatekeeper and a man, and vague setting in addition to the looming tone of a concluding moral. However, it ends dishearteningly, as the man is unable to gain access into “the law” and the reader is left wondering what the gatekeeper was guarding in the first place and why the man never followed his impulse to pass the gatekeeper throughout all the years. While a structuralism interpretation offers the reader a wide variety of structures to consider when reading the story, the Marxist perspective gives a much more specific interpretation of these structures and should therefore be considered the more useful interpretation compared to structuralism.

            A general interpretation of “Before the Law” can be characterized by structuralism. The interpretation skills behind structuralism involve considering not only the structures that appear in the story, but the structures in the reader’s and possibly the author’s world that influence these structures within the work of literature. From the first line of “Before the Law,” “Before the law sits a gatekeeper,” it is clear to the reader that there is a hierarchical structure in place between this gatekeeper and the intangible yet undefined “law” of the story. This hierarchy is further explored when “a man from the country” enters the story, requesting access to the law by way of the gatekeeper. This establishes that both the man and the gatekeeper are below the law, with the gatekeeper simultaneously being situated above the man, although the reasons are unbeknownst to the reader as to why. The gatekeeper also claims that there is an extended hierarchy of gatekeepers above him, one that apparently is so intense that the gatekeeper in the story “can’t even endure even one glimpse of the third [gatekeeper]” because he is so powerful. Beyond this hierarchical structure of the characters themselves in the story, the structure of the mind plays an important role in the tale, specifically the conflict the man faces of wanting what the gatekeeper refuses to give him. This conflict deteriorates the man’s mind and eventually drives him to becoming “childish” in his requests to the gatekeeper to gain entry into the law. Through this structuralist approach, the reader does not completely get a clear depiction of what exactly the law is, but only that it is something so powerful and high above both the gatekeeper and the man that the reader can only guess that that is why it is so unattainable for the man to gain access into it.

            While the structuralist interpretation looks at the larger and more general structures of “Before the Law,” no matter how limited its characters and setting, the Marxist interpretation offers a more specified look at these structures, particularly the hierarchical one between the active characters and the implied ones and the opportunity to gain entry into the law, or lack thereof. Marx heavily emphasized the crucial role that political structures play within society in his works, specifically the relationship the lower class had to the upper class. In the context of “Before the Law,” the man from the country can be seen as the lower class, or the proletariat, deferring to the bourgeoisie, or the upper class, as represented by the gatekeeper. Despite having no proof of his supposedly superior power, the gatekeeper assumes total power over the man in the country, much like how Marx describes how the bourgeoisie take governing control over the proletariat. Similar to the gatekeeper allowing the man to continually psychologically suffer until his death because he feels he is unable to gain entry into the law, Marx claims that the bourgeoisie leave the proletariat to struggle throughout their lives and never move from their position in society as the lower class. Essentially, the man and the gatekeeper of Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” parallel Marx’s ideas in terms of societal classes and their roles in society, thus making it a clearer and more directly useful interpretation of Kafka’s vague and open-ended work.