Kafkaesque
adjective
ˌkaf-
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Kafkaesque Literature
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a Czech-born German-language writer whose surreal fiction vividly expressed the anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness of the individual in the 20th century. The opening sentence of his 1915 story The Metamorphosis has become one of the most famous in Western literature (“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”), while in his novel The Trial, published a year after his death, a young man finds himself caught up in the mindless bureaucracy of the law after being charged with a crime that is never named. So deft was Kafka’s prose at detailing nightmarish settings in which characters are crushed by nonsensical, blind authority, that writers began using his name as an adjective a mere 16 years after his death. Although many other literary eponyms, from Austenian to Homeric, exist and are common enough, Kafkaesque gets employed more than most and in a wide variety of contexts, leading to occasional charges that the word has been watered down and given a lack of specificity due to overuse.
Examples of Kafkaesque in a Sentence
Samantha Bergeson, IndieWire, 10 Feb. 2025
The plot revolves around the Black protagonist’s Kafkaesque trial before the U.S. Supreme Court for supposedly attempting to restore slavery and segregation in his small, agrarian community near Los Angeles, and our hero’s reflections on what led him to this point.
—Barbara Ellis, The Denver Post, 3 Feb. 2025
Yet TikTok is still available in the U.S. in some sort of Kafkaesque legal limbo because President Trump refuses to enforce the law on the books.
—Philip Elliott, TIME, 28 Jan. 2025
Still, the most difficult aspect of the crisis is not the need to prepare for an unspecified economic threat from a close ally, but the need to cope with a sudden sense of almost Kafkaesque absurdity.
—Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, 18 Jan. 2025
The Productivity Paradox Haly’s future is snagged in a heartbreaking and maddening plot twist, one that may seem all too familiar in our Kafkaesque healthcare system.
—Naveen Rao, Forbes, 22 Oct. 2024
His mirthless laugh might have suggested Kafkaesque persecution, or Hardyesque inexorability of fate.
—Tad Friend, The New Yorker, 21 Oct. 2024
Much like his success building houses in Muara Angke, Prabowo wants to sidestep Indonesia’s Kafkaesque bureaucracy with direct action.
—Charlie Campbell / Jakarta, TIME, 14 Oct. 2024
The film centers on Leopold Trepper, a World War II spy mastermind, who faced a Kafkaesque struggle in 1970s Poland.
—Leo Barraclough, Variety, 18 Aug. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Kafkaesque.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Kafkaesque. Accessed 21 Feb. 2025.
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