0. Introduction: Why Kafka, and Why Boredom?
Based on the framework established in Phenomenology of Boredom, this article analyzes Franz Kafka’s trilogy of novels: The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), The Trial, and The Castle.
Previous posts:[The Phenomenology of Boredom: Why Modern Life & Most Content Feels Dead (Lost Agency)]
Why Kafka? He was never a man who dug deep into the world—not in career, race, nationality, or personal life. He always hovered on the periphery, agonizing over how to forge a relationship with the world. Thus, many critics view Kafka’s trilogy as dealing with “Solitude” or “Alienation.” But to me, the life and narrative style of his protagonists (Kafka’s alter egos) felt less lonely and more Boring.
So, I name this the “Boredom Trilogy” and will analyze the three works sequentially from the perspective of boredom. For convenience, I assume you subscribers haven’t read Kafka’s trilogy.
- Plot Summary (Action-centered).
- Why These Works Are Boring.
- How to create a life or content that isn’t boring. I will focus on Business Insights rather than literary exploration.
1. Recap: Phenomenology of Boredom
Boredom occurs when:
- You cannot connect to the Life-World.
- There is no Rhythm of Action Verbs, so the narrative isn’t felt.
- There is no possibility of Physical Control.
The point is the absence of the feeling: “I am living the world.”
- Existing Philosophy views boredom as an existential crisis alienated from the world.
- Literature explores the meaning of meaninglessness from an intellectual perspective.
- Our Approach: I’m not a scholar, so I don’t care about complex discussions. My goal is to decompose the process of perceiving boredom into World – Narrative – Body to understand how to create non-boring lives and content.
2. Novel Analysis: The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika)
Famous Reviews said:
- “The Man Who Disappeared is a story that goes on endlessly.” (Franz Kafka)
- “Karl Rossmann is a modern Sisyphus rolling the rock of belonging in vain.” (Albert Camus)
- “In this novel, we are placed in a world of emotions that are inappropriate, improper, unnatural, incomprehensible, or strangely missing.” (Milan Kundera)
They all focus on the “Emotion” of alienation while examining the relationship between the world and the self. The Problem is that Alienation is the result, not the process of the protagonist perceiving life as boring. So, We will immerse ourselves in the protagonist and dig into where and how the genuine feeling of boredom arises. Instead of getting lost in sentiment, digging into cognitive processes will offer much greater lessons.
(1) Basic Plot
Karl Rossmann is a seventeen-year-old German youth who is brutally abandoned by his parents after being seduced by a maid and impregnating her. Forcibly exiled to America under the guise of finding a new life, he is pushed onto a transatlantic ship with little choice but to face an uncertain future.
Upon arrival, Karl stands up for a stoker he meets “by chance” on the ship, earnestly appealing to the captain to correct the man’s unjust treatment. During this confrontation, he encounters another “chance” intersection: his uncle Jakob, a strict U.S. Senator who has successfully captured the American Dream. Although Karl fails to solve the stoker’s plight, he is taken in by his uncle and settles into his new American reality.
The uncle governs his estate with a ruthless emphasis on self-management and punctuality, mirroring the efficiency of a political figure like Franklin Roosevelt. One day, Karl leaves the house to visit his uncle’s friend upon a formal invitation. However, this innocent departure is misunderstood by his uncle as a direct rejection of his core principles, and Karl is kicked out, thrown back onto the streets.
Cast out once more, Karl crosses paths “by chance” with two swindlers, Delamarche and Robinson. As he wanders the city with them, he becomes an object of their systemic exploitation. Just as despair sets in, another “chance” encounter with the Head Chef of the Occidental Hotel throws him a lifeline, and he secures a job as an elevator boy.
Karl gradually adapts to the strict rhythms of hotel life, working diligently without any plausible grand goal. Yet, his fragile stability is shattered when Robinson visits him “by chance” and causes a scene. Despite his earnest labor, Karl is misunderstood by the Head Waiter, stripped of his dignity, and fired.
Now a vagrant once again, Karl is stopped “by chance” by the police for questioning. While fleeing from the suspicious officers, he is caught by none other than Delamarche. He resists to escape his captor, but ultimately gives up under the crushing weight of helplessness. He is forced to become a virtual slave to Brunelda, a wealthy woman off whom Delamarche is leeching.
In the novel’s unfinished final chapter, Karl spots a recruitment advertisement for the “Nature Theatre of Oklahoma” and clings to a final, sliver of hope. This theater, which hires anyone regardless of skill, age, or gender and ships them away on a train, stands as a bleak symbol of America—the immigrant nation that welcomes everyone yet synthesizes them into nothingness. The novel ends openly but essentially nowhere, implying the bleak, existential tragedy of a human being becoming, literally, a “Missing Person” (The Man Who Disappeared).
(2) Why Is This Work Boring?
Relationship with World: Repetition of Expulsion by Chance and Misunderstanding
As emphasized in the summary, Karl’s narrative unfolds mostly through “Chance” and “Misunderstanding.” This happens regardless of Karl’s active attempts to connect to the New World of America.
Let’s summarize Karl’s Situation:
- No understanding of the American lifestyle.
- Young.
- No experience or capital.
- Thrown directly into the world.
What readers wanted to see was trial, error, and achievement to connect to the life-world, but Kafka intentionally does not show this. Karl didn’t have the luxury of exhibiting purposeful wildness. Forced from Germany to the US, and then onto the streets at a young age, he simply never had the time to build the internal resources necessary to harness his primal energy.
Example:
- Karl was the one seduced by the maid, yet he is exiled for disgracing the family.
- On the ship to America, he presents his passport to introduce himself, but the purser flicks it away (Meaningless).
- Yet Karl mistakenly believes the formal procedure ended satisfactorily.
The world rejects Karl’s attempts to connect, relentlessly driving him away without ever giving him the chance to decode the mechanics of everyday life. Yet, Karl does not resist. Instead of despairing over this disconnection, he remains strangely detached. He simply accepts it with an ‘Oh, I see.’ This is where readers feel a sense of frustration; in Karl, they see a reflection of themselves—thrown into a world where they have learned nothing and, consequently, can do nothing.
In American society where Karl’s resources and values are useless, expulsion from the world due to chance and misunderstanding repeats.
Loss of Body: A Life Losing Physical Rhythm
In the successful Senator uncle’s house, Following his uncle’s strict orders, Karl spends his days studying English, practicing instruments, and training in horsemanship. However, the schedule is so suffocating that he loses all agency over his own body. Time drags on in a dull blur. Craving a small escape, Karl accepts an invitation from Mr. Pollunder—a decision that spirals into trouble. Despite his uncle’s silent warnings, Karl says yes, driven by a desperate yearning for a taste of freedom.
Since Karl didn’t achieve wealth and honor himself, the benefits provided by the uncle were boring, meaningless. But the uncle cannot tolerate this small deviation and orders him to leave. From the uncle’s perspective, his success was built on the foundation of American industriousness, and for Karl to become his successor, he had to endure this rigorous tempering process. To Karl, however, his uncle’s achievements were never something he desired; they were merely a ‘gift’ from a man he had met by chance on a ship. Since this wealth was simply his new default state, Karl could not understand why he was expected to push himself so hard.
Karl’s reaction remained strikingly consistent. He simply accepted everything, showing neither anger nor sorrow toward his uncle. Again, he merely yielded: ‘Oh, I see.’ While wandering aimlessly, Karl eventually joins Delamarche and Robinson in their search for work. However, he possesses no genuine ambition to become a street mechanic like them; he is simply drifting with the tide.
He holds a vague ideal of becoming a ‘German-style noble engineer.’ Yet, due to his lack of worldly experience, he has no concrete vision for his future. Consequently, in reality, he ends up as the ‘sucker’ of the group, footing the bill for everyone’s meals.
Once again, by ‘chance,’ Karl leaves Delamarche’s group at the request of a Head Chef who took a liking to him. He finds work as an elevator boy, adapting quickly and working diligently. Yet, he never truly subscribes to the narrative of the American Dream. In this world, the established code dictates that an elevator boy must dream of becoming a head waiter and eventually a manager. Instead of harboring such ambitions, however, Karl devotes his time to solving commercial correspondence exercises for his friend Therese and running mundane errands.
Here, the novel reads without boredom because the narrative proceeds through actions rather than verbose descriptions of Karl’s consciousness.
Karl Expelled Again from the Life-World
This is the point where the novel’s conflict reaches its climax. When his former colleague, Robinson, shows up drunk, Karl gets swept up in the chaos, leaves his post, and is summarily fired. Despite losing his entire livelihood, Karl could not swallow his pride; he remained obsessed with proving his innocence rather than securing his survival.
Why? Because Karl had already sensed that the Head Waiter never liked him from the start and was merely waiting for an excuse to fire him. He realized that no matter what he said, it wouldn’t change a thing. Furthermore, he didn’t want to burden the Head Chef, who had been so kind to him, in a situation where his own words and intentions would likely be twisted. So, once again, he simply yielded: ‘Oh, I see.’
Here, we see once again that Karl has failed to decode the rules of the world. The fundamental code of the American life-world is: ‘The law does not protect those who sleep on their rights.’ When his very survival was at stake, Karl should have aggressively asserted his rights, regardless of what the Head Waiter or the Head Chef might think.
Karl fails to read the room. In America, survival and success justify the means, much like his uncle’s climb to power. As long as the process remains within legal boundaries, the methods themselves are irrelevant. He had to fight for his own right. However, Karl could not bring himself to abandon his sense of ‘German Decency and Solemnity.’ To him, letting go of these values was unthinkable, as the world he grew up in was one where failing to uphold such standards meant immediate social exile.
Still, it was a significant step forward that Karl, for the first time, sensed the ‘injustice’ of his situation and hesitated, contemplating resistance. Furthermore, he relentlessly walks and runs to evade the police’s unjustified stop-and-search. As the narrative flows through these continuous action verbs, readers are finally allowed a brief respite from the prevailing sense of boredom.
Connection to World: Voluntarily Choosing the Life of a Servant
Karl ends up staying at Brunelda’s apartment with Delamarche and Robinson. They were already living off her wealth. In this strange household, Delamarche played the dual role of her lover and servant, while Robinson functioned as a servant to them both.
Karl initially refuses their demand to become a servant. However, a turning point arrives during a conversation with a university student living next door. The student is a young man living the grueling reality of the American Dream. He studies law late into the night, sacrificing sleep, and works at a department store during the day to earn a living. Gulping down coffee and trading his time for his dreams, he pushes himself to the limit.
Only then does Karl awaken to the ‘cold logic of survival’ in America. He confronts the harsh reality that he has neither money nor the practical skills to sustain himself. Accepting his predicament, he finally resolves to take on the domestic chores.
Karl Carefully prepares a meal for Brunelda and Delamarche using leftovers. Says “I’ll do better next time” and receives a biscuit as a reward. Only now does Karl begin to feel a sense of ease. Under the circumstances, becoming a servant was the most pragmatic choice he could make, given his limited skills and resources. The grand dreams of being a senator’s successor, a noble engineer, or a hotel manager were still far beyond his reach. Paradoxically, although Karl had descended to the rank of a servant, he was no longer plagued by boredom.
However, we must not mistake Karl’s existential relief for true liberation. His voluntary entry into Brunelda’s domestic servitude is not a triumphant reclamation of agency, but rather a bittersweet compromise—a defense mechanism of a human being stripped of embodied skills. Confronted with the abyss of boredom and existential void, the deskilled individual will choose the predictable comfort of a cage over the anxiety of a broken world. Karl does not conquer the world; he merely signs a contract with a master to escape his own numbness. This subtle surrender illustrates the limitation of the modern ‘settler’ who trades their innate sovereignty for security.
(3) Deep Analysis & Critique on Boredom
Regarding The Man Who Disappeared, critics usually say:
- It deconstructs modern optimism and the victory of reason (personal growth, historical progress).
- It shows an individual thoroughly alienated from the world.
- It exposes how capitalist ethics (diligence, time management, efficiency) exploit personal life.
These interpretations aren’t wrong, but they are too superficial to help my actual life. I want to analyze The Man Who Disappeared through the lens of Boredom. This operates on two layers.
Without Embodied Skills, Life Becomes Boring
What was the root of Karl’s terminal boredom? The reason is that he is constantly uprooted and cast into unfamiliar life-worlds by external forces, leaving him no room for subjective choice. Every time he tries to anchor himself and connect with a specific world, an unforeseen misfortune strikes, driving him out once again. Consequently, he fails to accumulate the vital resources—be it social connections, capital, or specialized know-how—needed to thrive.
We witness Karl’s failure to truly interface with the American life-world. This is because he has failed to internalize its core codes. While Karl physically resides in America, he remains alien to the logic that governs it—the American Dream, which posits that hard work and wealth are the ultimate keys to agency. Instead, he clings to a vague German ideal of a ‘dignified office job.’ In the German context, honor and social status often outweigh the ‘hustle’ for capital. Consequently, from an American perspective, Karl appears to lack the internal drive for achievement and upward mobility.
he fundamental cause of Karl’s aimless wandering is his lack of ’embodied skills’ that would allow him to survive outside the specific structure of German society. Imagine if he possessed practical expertise in carpentry, cooking, writing, or metalworking. With such tangible assets, he could have easily found his utility in America and secured a seat on the train toward the American Dream. Even the English, piano, and business management skills his uncle tried to instill were, in fact, the essential toolkit for survival within the American upper class.
But: No Embodied Skills → Cannot interpret the world → Cannot assign meaning. As a result, life becomes boring.
This is why Karl is so deeply moved when Brunelda praises him for a meal made from leftovers; in that moment of shared sustenance, he pledges his absolute loyalty. Even in the unfinished chapters, Karl is depicted as her devoted caretaker. While Delamarche and Robinson have already abandoned her, Karl remains by her side. Although she is morbidly obese and immobilized, and despite having every opportunity to flee, he chooses not to forsake her.
The lesson we must draw is this: like Karl, who was thrust into America, we too must decode the underlying codes of our life-world to survive. Our bodies require ’embodied software.’ Of course, one can get by with just ‘hardware’—such as money—without any software. Ultimately, however, you must possess Embodied Skills like cooking, writing, carpentry, or language. Why? To borrow a Merleau-Pontian perspective, it is because we are beings who derive meaning through the body.
If You Can’t Turn Chance & Misunderstanding into Necessity & Meaning, Life Becomes Boring
Kafka’s narrative style is boring. Actually, the plot is simple.
Thrown into a new world → Slight adaptation → Chance & Misunderstanding → Expulsion → Thrown into a new world again.
The Problem is the fact that Karl doesn’t feel his life is boring frustrates the reader. Kafka seems to be implicitly asking: “Aren’t you also failing to feel that your current life is boring, just like Karl?”
In fact, our reality is not that different from Karl’s. Think about it. Whenever we get stressed by unexpected chance and misunderstanding: We escape to Netflix, YouTube, Alcohol. Just so we don’t feel the boredom. However, since that pleasure is only momentary, you find yourself unable to stop the boredom without ‘binge-watching content.
But what if we didn’t just escape, but turned that stress into Necessity and Meaning? We need software that can transform life’s accidents and misfortunes into something meaningful. If we only run from pain, it remains meaningless — and life becomes unbearably dull.
As unsolved chance and misunderstanding accumulate:
- “Why is this happening to me?”
- “What does this mean?” You fall into thought, fail to perceive the phenomenon properly, and life feels meaningless. This makes us depressed.
Settler-centric societies (Democratic welfare states) built a stable triangle system to prevent falling into this loop.
- Individual: Work hard in youth, save/invest → Convert to pension in old age for stable cash flow.
- Corporation: Encourages converting everything (including subjective value) into currency to sell.
- Government: Maintains the system preserving the value of currency and assets.
Under this system, even if life hits a snag due to a temporary mishap or misunderstanding, money can resolve the trouble by purchasing the necessary goods or services. However, money is merely hardware. What if the state renders that money useless? Or what if a massive economic or technological shift hurls you into an entirely different life-world, just as it did to Karl?
When life is upended by turbulence, the stable foundations of settler-centric societies begin to crack. The golden age of the democratic welfare state of the 1980s is drawing to a close. We have been thrust into an era where excessive labor protections trigger aggressive AI investment, while the state encourages debt and erodes its value through inflation.
I also lived the Settler Route. Graduated from a good university, got a job, went to grad school in Korea. Walked the path minimizing chance and misunderstanding. I thought building solid economic and social capital would make everything possible.
But after experiencing firing, COVID-19, Inflation, I realized that in a real crisis, the government protects itself first, not the people. I began to doubt everything society and the state taught me. “Is this really true?”
As time passed, I thought, “This is all just a Settler Mindset and Ideology.” I decided to face chance and misunderstanding My Way, not society’s way, and assign meaning to them by myself. I came to realize that in order to reclaim sovereignty over my own life, I had to let go of everything that kept imposing settler-centric expectations on me — family, friends, all of it. I realized this is the Nomadic Lifestyle.
Recording this process in writing has value. That is why I blog. Creators are the same. You must love the chance and misunderstanding that threaten to destroy your life as a settler. And, Make content that unravels them through your unique perception. Show those in settler society who ask “Why am I unhappy when I did what society told me?” that Another Field of Meaning exists.
Table: Settler vs. Nomad
| Category | Settler | Nomad |
| Response to Chance | Solve with Money | Solve with Embodied Skill |
| Response to Misunderstanding | Solve with Law/System | Sublimate into Meaning |
| Way of Life | Stable but Boring | Unstable but Alive |
| Value | Accumulate Currency | Embody Experience |
(4) Making Life/Content Not Boring
Nomad Lifestyle: Connecting to Multiple Worlds with Embodied Skills
Codes like culture, custom, law, and history are accumulated over ages and do not change easily. To successfully connect to any life-world—new school, company, country—like a nomad, you must possess Embodied Skills.
Karl failed to connect to the American Dream code because he lacked this. Conversely, small business owners and creators:
- Can cook.
- Can speak basic English.
- Can make content.
- So wherever they go, there is little room for boredom.
To truly embody a skill, it is crucial to maintain a mindset of overcoming a ‘1% hurdle’ in your daily life. This not only boosts your sense of internal achievement but is also the only way to transform chance into destiny and misunderstanding into meaning. As time passes, you become an OS rich with software, seamlessly interfacing with the world around you.
On the other hand, a settler life centered on a company is stable but boring. The skills honed within a corporation often become useless once you leave, as they are tailored for standardized tasks within a bureaucratic structure. Outside the company walls, you find yourself powerless. This lifestyle ultimately restricts your freedom, turning you into a ‘slave’ who craves the protection of the democratic welfare state. Even if that state betrays you, you find yourself unable to escape its fence.
Settler societies never teach you how to survive on your own terms or construct meaning from scratch. Institutions originally designed to guarantee a comfortable life for individuals have outgrown their ideals, becoming monolithic entities. To sustain themselves, they must now suppress our freedom and primal instincts. This is precisely why moralistic discourse is inflating globally—these are ideologies that simply did not exist in societies where individuals had to ‘hustle’ just to survive. That was an era animated by ‘organic solidarity,’ rather than fake morality or mob-rule moralism.
For me, This artificial moral paternalism and interventionism enacted by the modern welfare state echoes the ancient myths of Gnosticism. It mirrors the mechanism of Demiurge—the flawed, lesser deity who constructed a labyrinth of rigid laws and morals to suppress the human spirit’s primal, transcendent essence (Pneumatikos). Just as the Demiurge binds souls to a flawed material realm through the illusion of the law and order, the modern welfare state utilizes the inflation of moral discourse to paralyze individual sovereignty, converting human sprit into passive obedience.
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish: Attitude to Turn Chance/Misunderstanding into Meaning
Creators must break free from the comfortable fence of the welfare state and preserve their embodied skills and wildness. Creators must handle the chance and misunderstanding encountered in life as content. So they are not bored. So the readers are not bored.
Maintain the attitude: “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.”
This is the fundamental reason why artists produce great work when hungry and struggling, but lose creative energy after marriage and success. This is precisely why most hip-hop masterpieces are the first and second albums. It is rapidly losing its wildness. Readers might not want creators to be overly successful. Just enough not to die.
Why? Because they always want to see through the creator that Another Way of Life is Possible. In daily life, people follow settler society’s teachings. They focus on converting everything into monetary value and accumulating it. However, deep within, there is always a question: “Is this all there is to life?”
Therefore, The prime mission of a creator is to show a different way of life. To do this, you must hold onto the Hungry, Foolish attitude.
3. Conclusion
In this article, we examined Franz Kafka’s The Man Who Disappeared. Karl Rossmann is A German youth immigrated to America. Kafka’s America is a lifeworld with the following codes:
- Strictly manages time.
- A place where not a minute or second should be wasted.
- Must succeed by pouring everything in, reducing sleep and chugging coffee like the law student or the uncle.
- A place where success justifies all processes and reputation.
- A society that gives opportunity but doesn’t teach the method.
- A place where no one takes responsibility if you don’t claim your own rights.
Karl’s failure stems from being thrust into America at too young an age, leaving him no time to acquire embodied skills or resources. He was perpetually swept away by chance and misunderstanding, drifting like a leaf in the wind. Ultimately, unable to endure the gnawing boredom of a life without agency, he was cornered into becoming a servant—and found a strange comfort in it.
Perhaps this novel is Kafka’s own ‘imaginary emigration’; as a German-speaking Jew in Prague who constantly dreamt of escape and followed Zionism, he was likely imagining his own fate had he ever reached American shores.
Those living within the safety net of the democratic welfare state crave what they lack most: a wild, liberated life sustained by one’s own physical grit rather than a monthly paycheck. Since they can never bring themselves to make such a perilous choice, they demand it from creators instead. Take hip-hop, for instance; this is exactly why lyrics about gangsters and the mafia have been recycled for over thirty years. What the public wants is to experience, through the artist, a world they have never been to and can never reach.
Boredom dies where the body remembers. Pack skills, not savings.
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