Essence of 'Kafkaesque'
if asked what Kafkaesque is? Sure, you might be shouting at your computer or smartphone screen, we know what "Kafkaesque" is. Obviously, it means reminiscent of the themes and events found in the work of Franz Kafka, the Prague-born author whose famous stories (such as The Trial and The Metamorphosis) drew upon the soul-crushing bureaucratic machinery of the aging Austro-Hungarian empire. We can even get more specific, though. "Kafkaesque" describes, as the Oxford Dictionaries would put it, "oppressive or nightmarish qualities," or as Merriam-Webster suggests, "having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality." Here's the rub, though: Any time an author's oeuvre becomes the basis for its own descriptor (Orwellian, Dickensian, Proustian), the meaning of that adjective depends completely on the interpretations of the original work. No matter what the dictionary says about "Kafkaesque," the true denotatio