Sacrafice in Kafka

The most prominent example of this tendency appears in "The Fasting-Artist". The artist fasts for public admiration, so that ladies can have the place of honor holding his body and crowds can come to look at him. He thinks that fasting is not a sacrifice at all; "he knew...how easy fasting was" (212) but his ability to eat the food supplied to him by watchmen who cannot understand "the honor of his art" (210) shows that it costs him at least some effort when his audience does not appreciate his sacrifice. He feels that his true sacrifice is "lying in bed almost at his last gasp...the consequence of the premature ending of his fast" (215) which he does, again, because after "about forty days...the audience fell away" (212). So great is his dedication to sacrifice and to his art that, when

The officer's sacrifice, on the other hand, can hardly be considered humane, though it is just as self-directed. The penal colony's officer, who tries, prosecutes, sentences, and executes prisoners convicted of crimes such as insubordination, shows a voyager the colony's method of execution: death by a machine that carves the commandment violated on the condemned man's flesh. According to the officer, "enlightenment dawns" (137) on the condemned man's face as he understands the gravity of his crime, and justice triumphs. The voyager, understandably upset by the process of justice in the colony, is resolved to condemn the means of execution, which the colony's new commandant opposes; this will mean the end of the practice. Upon learning of this, the officer kills himself with the machine, inscribing "Be Just!" into his own flesh. If he is reacting to the voyager's condemnation, the officer has given his life for justice, or at least what he considers justice. But although he is the only remaining vocal supporter of this justice, the only one who would consider it just, he fails to benefit from his sacrifice. In his dead face, "no sign of the promised deliverance could be detected; what all the others had found in the machine, the officer had not found" (152). Similarly, the voyager irrationally finds that if the procedure "was really on the point of being abolished--possibly as a result of the voyager's own intervention, to which he felt himself committed--then the officer was now acting perfectly rightly" (149). The victim of the sacrifice suffers and the beneficiary gains; this is the way a sacrifice is supposed to work. But nothing about the officer's punishment makes logical sense.

Though Grete claims that the family has done "everything humanly possible to look after it [Gregor(!)]" (119), it is ironically Gregor who remains more human than his family, who now refer to him as "it". He never stops wanting to sacrifice himself for them in whatever way he can. He does his best to spare them the sight of him; after realizing that his sister hates to see him, "he transport[s] a sheet to the sofa on his back--the task took him four hours--and arrange[s] it in such a way that...his sister would not be able to see him" (100). He continues to try to take financial responsibility for his family. "Whenever the conversation turned to the necessity of earning money...Gregor...felt hot all over with shame and grief" (99). He fantasizes of "tak[ing] the family's affairs in hand again" (111). Even his death appears to be in response to his sister's wish that he would vanish; his dying thought is that "his own opinion that he must disappear was...firmer than his sister's" (122). Yet by this point, Gregor's family has ceased to think of him as human. T

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