Kafka's America and Labour Migrant Workers

Kafka has written this book although he has never been to the USA. I will now interpret the book based on the evidence on his imagination. It is very interesting that the journey to the USA starts legally. But Karl Rossmann is almost an asylum-seeker. The reason for that is that he is sent by his family to the USA as a half-exile. Because he had a scandalous affair with a maid and this was an unacceptable situation in the case of his family with aristocratic origins. Therefore, he goes to the USA being recommended to someone who knows his father and starts to work in a job.

In this first job he does the things that he is told to do without questioning. But later with the conspiracy of a friend, he encounters some problems such as being accused of fraud. Hence, he is fired and he has to find another job. Of course in the free market there are no labour rights and since we are considering the USA in the beginning of the 1900s where these themes are not controlled and checked by the labour unions. The second job that  Karl takes is fairly a better job.

In the end, he finds a job with his friends that he met on the train, a job he has to do out of necessity. Because he needs money and he needs a place to stay. But this turns into a real human slavery. The so called friends put him in a room, they give him only a little bit of food to survive. They don’t let him go out. At this point it turns into "trafficking" with modern terms, because he does not have the free will to leave the place. He is forced to stay there and serve them. Finally he makes his way through this job as well. The two others, one Irish and one French friend that have taken him there with the idea of having a proper job actually prove that the job is being a servant and whether is is paid or not, Karl does not know, neither do we.

The end of the book is not so pessimistic. Not to spoil it I will not talk about the ending. But he is finally free to go out, as long as he serves the main lady, an overweight, demanding and cruel woman. 

Kafka says that he would have liked to finish the book in two diverse ways. In one of them, he is still in slavery and in the other he is on a train that goes to the east and he watches the cornfields… but he finishes it in a totally different manner.

One can think about being an exile, migrant worker without any rights and without any checks and controls in the system, what can happen to a man who travels so far although he has a recommended job and some kind of social network.