Novel: Amerika

Overview
Franz Kafka’s Amerika, published posthumously in 1927 and sometimes titled The Man Who Disappeared, follows the misadventures of sixteen-year-old Karl Rossmann, a European exile sent to the United States after a scandal with a household maid. The novel is unfinished, but Max Brod’s edition presents a sequence of vivid episodes that trace Karl’s movement from hopeful arrival to perpetual dispossession. Kafka’s America is a comic-grotesque landscape where hospitality and opportunity skew into surveillance, humiliation, and servitude, and where mobility is promised yet always precarious.

Plot
Karl arrives in New York harbor, greeted by a Statue of Liberty that holds a sword instead of a torch, an emblem of the novel’s slantwise satire. On the ship he befriends a stoker whose grievance against an officer Karl earnestly argues before the captain. In the midst of this scene, Karl is claimed by a wealthy relative, Senator Jacob, who recognizes him and whisks him into a high-status household. For a moment, order and protection appear to replace chaos. Yet the patronage is brittle. Karl is instructed to keep to a narrow regimen and is warned about the dangers of improvisation.

A dinner invitation from Mr. Pollunder, a business associate, tests this precarious security. At Pollunder’s mansion Karl is drawn into a night of subtle traps, flirtation, and intimidation, especially in an encounter with Pollunder’s daughter, Clara. Staying out late against his uncle’s wishes occasioned by this visit, Karl returns to find the door closed. Uncle Jacob, angered by perceived disobedience and perhaps anxious to erase any reminder of Karl’s origins, banishes him without appeal. The promise of family dissolves with bureaucratic coolness.

Adrift, Karl falls in with two vagrants, the Irishman Robinson and the Frenchman Delamarche. They are by turns companionable, manipulative, and parasitic, and Karl’s moral scruples keep colliding with his need for shelter. Through chance and initiative he secures work as an elevator boy at the Hotel Occidental, a mechanized hive of rules, schedules, uniforms, and minute infractions. For a brief period he thrives on procedure. The order collapses when Robinson reappears drunk and demands help; Karl’s attempt to assist leads to an accusation of dereliction and summary dismissal. Again, a system that seemed to offer stability proves fatally unforgiving.

Dragged along by Delamarche, Karl becomes an unwilling servant to Brunelda, a capricious, domineering singer who keeps both men as retainers. The apartment turns into a caricature of domestic tyranny, with Karl reduced to a porter and go-between. He dreams of escape, and the dream takes form when posters announce the Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma, a traveling enterprise that “hires everyone.” In the extant final chapter, Karl journeys west, is provisionally accepted, and receives a new name, “Negro”, as if identity could be reset by employment and geography. The episode suggests release and belonging while echoing the novel’s pattern of alluring promises shadowed by erasure.

Themes and Motifs
Alienation and hospitality intertwine, as every sanctuary becomes a gatekeeping apparatus. Authority appears personable, a benevolent uncle, a hotel manager, an impresario, yet operates through abrupt exclusions. Work oscillates between redeeming structure and dehumanizing drill; uniforms and titles confer meaning while rendering the wearer interchangeable. America is less a nation than a stage set where mobility, reinvention, and abundance are endlessly advertised and continually deferred. The sword in Liberty’s hand crystallizes the book’s irony: welcome as judgment, opportunity as discipline.

Form and Context
Amerika reads like a picaresque of dispossession, its episodes comic, brisk, and edged with nightmare logic. The prose is clearer and more outwardly sociable than Kafka’s other novels, but the mechanisms of guilt, misunderstanding, and institutional opacity remain central. Left unfinished, the work gains a haunting openness: Karl is always on the threshold, of a home, a job, a role, never fully inside, never entirely cast out.