SPATIAL DISORIENTATION AND SUBJECTIVE FRAGMENTATION IN KAFKA’S “THE METAMORPHOSIS” AND “THE TRIAL”
SPATIAL DISORIENTATION AND SUBJECTIVE FRAGMENTATION IN KAFKA’S “THE METAMORPHOSIS” AND “THE TRIAL”

Summary/Abstract: Grounded in Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodern spatial logic and Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of intimate space, this paper explores the role of space as a key element of modernist anxiety in Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and “The Trial,” focusing on how spatial structures reflect and intensify the psychological fragmentation. Kafka’s claustrophobic and disorienting spaces serve as metaphors for existential and social alienation. In “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor Samsa’s transformation coincides with a loss of spatial agency: his familiar room becomes a site of confinement, symbolic of his eroding identity, communication, and autonomy. The domestic space is no longer a refuge but a prison mirroring his disintegration. In “The Trial,” Josef K.’s journey unfolds within a labyrinth of attics and hidden courts, where authority is dispersed, and geography is unreadable. This architectural chaos exemplifies Jameson’s “failure of cognitive mapping”: individuals cannot orient themselves or comprehend the world’s totality. By applying Jameson’s and Gaston Bachelard’s frameworks, Kafka constructs a poetics of space that unsettles physical boundaries and undermines existential certainties. Spatial disorientation is a structural mechanism that generates meaning and exposes modern subjectivity’s anxieties. Ultimately, Kafka’s works anticipate a broader spatial crisis: the loss of coherent space parallels the collapse of coherent identity.

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