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protagonists Job, Josef K and John Milton long for two clarities: one to comprehend the incomprehensible, and the other, to legitimate Justice. In a world order that arises out of khaos to eternally return to khaos, they are bound to be ship wrecked in the midst of the rational and the irrational. In this tragic theatre, life and death become an absurd contradiction, says Camus.108 Indeed, while humans value existence, their endeavors are meaningless because the universe is indifferent, and because humans in the end, die.109 Condemned, like Sisyphus to an eternal, ceaseless and pointless toil,110 they push and push their boulders only to witness the futility of every affair. Yet Camus does not affirm suicide or nihilism, but dignity and clarity when confronting the Absurd 3⁄4 the pointless quest for meaning in a meaningless world.111 To Camus, says Mora, meaning can be created howsoever much all things are ever changing, unjust, and ephemeral. Thus, Job, Josef K and John Milton create meaning in their absurd and futile quests. Job confronts Yahweh’s absolutism, oppression and injustice; Josef K defends his rights and those of the unjustly accused; and John Milton defends liberty against the oppression of King Charles I’s reign. Yet Josef K far surpasses Job and Milton in misapprehending the Court’s omnipotence.
Whether the Court belongs to a secular or transcendental reality, Josef K, the flawed tragic hero, neither outstanding in virtue nor vice, miscalculates his archenemy, the Court. Entangled with the Prosecutor’s titanic and irascible power as objectionable and belligerent as Job’s Satan, Josef K must confront, in solitude, the furies of the Theatre of the Absurd and battle his Prosecutor-Satan, just as Jesus battles his Satan. Both must affront their Courts or Sanhedrins and their cruelties, and be executed in guilt and shame, stripped from glory. In their willed executions, Josef K and Jesus repudiate like D•Scholars, the master-servant and guilt-punishment edifice erected by Judaism’s metanarrative. If Josef K, a lapsed Christian, partakes in Jesus’ guilt-free morality, it is implicit that Jesus’ teachings forgive his flaws and sins.
G•Scholars, governing the debate, insist, however, on inculpating K. Overwhelmed by the ordeal’s futility, reminiscent of an aporia of Zeno,112Josef K denies he is guilty and hostile towards the Court, which G•Scholars disdain. They argue K is executed because he is guilty, because he is deluded as to the Court, because morality is too difficult for him,113 because he rationalizes his moral failure,114 because he blames others for it,115 because he evades,116 because he refuses Mommy,117 because the Court is trying to show him the True Way and he fails to see it, etc. Hence, Josef K is mediocre, non-heroic, non-exceptional, and next to Job, well, he is a shade.118
107 Camus, Albert. Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Paris, 1942. 19. In Cox’s footnote 4. Cox, Dermot. The Triumph of Impotence. Job and the Tradition of the Absurd. Analecta Gregoriana. Roma: Universita Gregoriana Editrice, 1978. 24
108 Camus. Le Mythe de Sisyphe. The Triumph of Impotence. Job and the Tradition of the Absurd. Analecta Gregoriana. Roma: Universita Gregoriana Editrice, 1978. 18
109 Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. London: Penguin, 1942. 119
110 Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. London: Penguin, 1942. 119
111 Camus, Albert. Le Mythe de Sisyphe. In Cox, Dermot. The Triumph of Impotence. Job and the Tradition of the Absurd. Analecta Gregoriana. Roma: Universita
Gregoriana Editrice, 1978. 18
112 Zeno’s paradoxes 3⁄4 contrasted to Heraclitus’ doctrine of flux or change, the awareness that everything flows given their perpetual motion 3⁄4 underlies
existential futility. Zeno’s aporias deny motion, and are also, in Borges’ erudition, a precursor to Kafka’s stories. Borges. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. “Kafka and his Precursors.” Ed. By Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: A New Directions Book, 1964. 199. For further study of Zeno’s paradox, please refer to Waterfield’s text. Waterfield, Robin. The First Philosophers. The Presocratics and the Sophists. “Zeno of Elea.” USA: Oxford University Press, 2009. 69-81
113 Lasine, Stuart. “Job and his Friends in the Modern World: Kafka’s The Trial.” In The Voice from the Whirlwind: Interpreting the Book of Job, ed. L. G. Perdue and W. C. Gilpin. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992. 152. In Scott, Len. Josef K.: Kafka’s Anti-Job. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2010. 16
114 Robertson, Ritchie. Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. 103. Scott, Len. Josef K.: Kafka’s Anti-Job. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2010. 16
115 Henel, Ingeborg. "The Legend of the Doorkeeper and its Significance for Kafka's Trial." Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Trial. New Jersey: Prentice- Hall, 1976. 40-55, 47. In Scott, Len. Josef K.: Kafka’s Anti-Job. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2010. 3-8
116 To Lasine, Josef K evades accountability for his actions. He contrasts sharply with Job who reviews his life “after imploring God to weigh him on a just balance (31:6).” “K never weighs his life in an autobiography.” Lasine, Stuart. “The Trials of Job and Kafka’s Josef K.” The German Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 2, Focus: Jews and Germans/Jewish–German Literature (Spring, 1990), 193. In addition to Lasine’s reference to Job’s Oath of Innocence (31), see also Job’s declamations,
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