Question of Being in Kafkaesque World: An Ontological Study of Kafka’s ‘Researches of A Dog’ and ‘The Silence of Sirens

Abstract

Being alludes to a condition of having a presence and existence. This existence provides the rationality of things either they are humans or objects. First comes the being which is later followed by the thoughts, ideas and actions. Kafka presents characters confronting with existential traumas in a world with no pre-defined set of rules. In a state of being thrown, they find themselves struggling in creating good faith when they have limited number of resources and opportunities. Current research unfolds the different modes of being adopted by Researcher Dog and Odysseus while striving for authentic existence yet different environmental factors push them back towards bad faith. With constant struggle, they are able to cope with existential challenges and succeeded in storing a prominent place. Kafkaesque world is a sort of puzzle due to its multiplicity of meaning that is caused by complex narrative. In current research, selected short stories are studied through the frame-work of ontology and question of being is discussed at
length to understand the existential trauma in proper.