Before the Law

by Franz Kafka

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man

from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper
says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about
it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,”
says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law
stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man
bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the
gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much,
try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am
only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand
gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one
glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such
difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks,
but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his
large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that
it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The
gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in
front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many
attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests.
The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his
homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the
kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he
cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many
things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win
over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am
taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.”
During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost
continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to
him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky
circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he
grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in
the long years studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in
his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper.
Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are
really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him.
But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks
inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has
much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his
experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet
put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his
stiffening body.

The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has
changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know,
then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the
law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has
requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in
order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one
else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now
to close it.
A Summary and Analysis of
Franz Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Before the Law’ is a short story or parable by the

German-language Bohemian (now Czech) author
Franz Kafka (1883-1924). It was published in 1915
and later included in Kafka’s (posthumously
published) novel The Trial, where its meaning is
discussed by the protagonist Josef K. and a priest he
meets in a cathedral. ‘Before the Law’ has inspired
numerous critical interpretations and prompted many
a debate, in its turn, about what it means.

So, what is the meaning of this short fable? You can

read ‘Before the Law’ here before proceeding to our
summary and analysis below.

‘Before the Law’: summary

Before the law there stands a doorkeeper (or

gatekeeper in some translations). A man from the
country turns up and asks to be admitted to the law.
But the doorkeeper tells him that he cannot grant him
access to the law now. The man asks if he can be
admitted later, and the doorkeeper replies that it’s
possible. But not now.

The door to the law is open, and the man tries to peer
through it. The doorkeeper challenges him to try to
look through to the law, but warns him that if the man
tries to get past him, he is powerful and will stop him.
And there are other, more powerful doorkeepers
beyond him, too.

The man considers this, taking in the powerful

appearance of the doorkeeper, who is dressed in a fur
coat and has a hooked nose and black beard. The
man decides it would be better to wait until he has
permission to enter.

The man ends up sitting there for years, continually

pleading with the doorkeeper to let him have
admittance to the law. But the doorkeeper’s answer is
always the same. The man even tries to bribe the
doorkeeper, but although the doorkeeper accepts the
bribes, he still doesn’t let the man through the door,
telling him that he’s only taken the bribes ‘so you
don’t think you have neglected anything.’
As the years go by, the man forgets that there are
other doorkeepers beyond this one, and thinks this
first doorkeeper is the only thing between him and
the law. He grows old, and has become fully
acquainted with the doorkeeper, even down to the
fleas in the man’s collar. His eyes start to fail.

As he lies dying, he asks the doorkeeper one last

question. Everyone wants admittance to the law, so
how come nobody else except him has tried to gain
entry to it?

The doorkeeper tells him, as the man dies, that

nobody else could be admitted to this particular door.
‘This door was meant only for you,’ he tells him. ‘Now
I am going to close it.’

‘Before the Law’: analysis

One of the ways to ‘get’ Kafka and understand what

his work means is to view it as one vast metaphor for
the struggle of life itself.

So The Trial, the novel in which ‘Before the Law’

appears, is not about one man’s specific trial for some
specific crime, but is instead about the ‘trials’ of
living, the ‘process’ (to use the original German word
for the novel’s title) of dealing with a nagging sense
of guilt for some vague and unspecified sin or
wrongdoing, just as it is about the ‘process’ or ‘trial’
of negotiating innumerable bureaucratic obstacles
that dominate our adult life.

One critic, Mark Spilka, produced a study in the

1960s, Dickens and Kafka: A mutal interpretation,
which argued that Kafka, like Dickens, was essentially
childlike in his understanding of the world. And
children both fail to understand the need for tortuous
administrative and legal process (where
necessary) and immediately see through such
processes when they are clearly unneeded, or even
actively harmful.

Viewed this way, Kafka is essentially the authorial

version, writ large, of the little boy at the end of ‘The
Emperor’s New Clothes’ who calls out the delusion
that all the adults are blindly (or, in many cases,
willingly) following.

In one sense, then, ‘Before the Law’ – which was

written around the time that Kafka wrote The Trial –
might be analysed as a microcosm of that longer
work, a distilling of the central meaning of that 200-
page novel into just two pages.

Much as Josef K. in The Trial tries to penetrate the

obscurities and complexities of the law in order to
clear his name of whatever crime he has been
accused of (famously, he never learns what this crime
is supposed to be), so the ‘man from the country’ in
‘Before the Law’ comes to ‘the law’, represented as
some physical space that lies beyond the doorway
being guarded, in the hope of being admitted to it
and, we presume, understanding it. But like Josef K.
he discovers nothing before his death.

Well, he does discover something: namely that this

door was meant for him and him alone. What does
the ‘law’ and this special exclusive ‘door’ represent?
As so often with Kafka’s writing, a religious
interpretation seems likely. After all, in The Trial, it is
a priest who tells the parable to Josef K.

Those wishing to understand God, represented here

as a ‘law’, are ready to devote their lives to him and
want to get to know God in some deeper sense. But
they are always kept out from God, and are not
meant to understand him fully in this life. As the Bible
famously says, in 1 Corinthians 13:12:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face

to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even
as also I am known.

In other words, Christians (though we might also

include Jews and the Rabbinic tradition in this,
stretching back to before St Paul) are not meant to
‘know’ God directly in this life. Like the man from the
country, a sort of everyman representing us all, we
are always kept outside the door and can never gain
admittance.

But if ‘Before the Law’ should be analysed as an

allegory for religious faith, especially in the Judeo-
Christian tradition, what is the significance of the door
being closed at the end of the story? Surely when the
man dies he should be granted access to the door,
and ‘the law’, and see ‘God’ or the law ‘face to face’?

Well, Kafka’s fiction doesn’t necessarily endorse

religion or promote a belief in the existence of God.
What is known is the secular world of the here-and-
now, where men ferociously guard ‘the law’ and
determine what is the ‘right’ way to get to God and
heaven, much as St Paul was doing in his ‘through a
glass darkly’ quotation.

So if ‘Before the Law’ is a parable for religious faith, it

is one which ends, not with revelation and epiphany,
but simply with death. The man who devoted his life
to attempting to gain admittance to God has died and
still not gained admittance.

Perhaps there is nothing beyond the door after all. He

has only the doorkeeper’s word that
there is something beyond there. (And think of
‘doorkeeper’ here as a description of this man’s role.
It’s akin to the term ‘gatekeeper’, which we use for
those people who fiercely guard something and try to
keep others out.)

This interpretation also helps to make sense of the

bribes that the man gives to the doorkeeper, echoing
the ways in which wealthy people have often bought
indulgences and other special favours from the
Church in the hope that they can buy their way into
heaven.
But if ‘Before the Law’ is a parable, designed to
convey a message to those who read or hear it – i.e.,
much like the parables that Jesus tells his followers in
the New Testament – then it is also like Jesus’
parables in another, more troubling sense.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus tells his disciples (in Mark

4:11-12) that not everyone is meant to ‘perceive’ the
meaning of his preachments, and that he
actually doesn’t want everyone to be converted and
have their sins forgiven. Jesus doesn’t want everyone
to follow him because that would mean they would all
be forgiven for their sins; and he uses parables as a
way of concealing the truth from people (or, at best,
only partially revealing it), rather than using parables
to help them understand.

There is a sense, then, in which ‘Before the Law’ is

like a riddle without a solution, and it is meant to be
as impenetrable as the process that it describes. It is
playful and frustrating on purpose. Like ‘the law’
itself, ‘Before the Law’ remains impenetrable.

About Franz Kafka

The German-speaking Bohemian (now Czech) author
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) has been called everything
from a modernist to an existentialist, a fantasy writer
to a realist. His work almost stands alone as its own
subgenre, and the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ – whose
meaning, like the meaning of Kafka’s work, is hard to
pin down – has become well-known even to people
who have never read a word of Kafka’s writing.

Perhaps inevitably, he is often misinterpreted as

being a gloomy and humourless writer about
nightmarish scenarios, when this at best conveys only
part of what he is about.

Much of Kafka’s work remained unpublished until

after his death. As he lay dying of tuberculosis in
1924, he commanded his friend Max Brod to burn all
of his unpublished material (and even his published
work). Brod refused to honour Kafka’s dying wish,
seeing his friend’s slim body of work as an original
contribution to literature and too important not to
publish.