WORD OF THE DAY

kafkaesque
characteristic or reminiscent of the oppressive or nightmarish qualities of Franz Kafka's fictional world

Franz Kafka constructed inscrutable realities--worlds of absurd rules, behaviours, and events, where the protagonists struggled in vain to uncover or create meaning. This word is definitely bigger than a one-sentence definition.

Kafka biographer Frederick R. Karl explains:

"What I'm against is someone going to catch a bus and finding that all the buses have stopped running and saying that's Kafkaesque. That's not... What's Kafkaesque... is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces...

"You don't give up, you don't lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don't stand a chance...

"You struggle against history and history destroys you."