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Global Experience, Much of the literature that grapples with assimilation…

- - - - An intense, overwhelming aura of shame and alienation pervades Kafka's writing. In his professional life, he spoke Yiddish at home, Hebrew in school, and German at work. In how many contexts can someone "blend into" their surroundings and feel truly at home in any of them?
        
        Still, what is wrong with trying to make yourself comfortable where you are? The novel opens, "Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested." (3)
        
        If diaspora is forced by violence, is assimilation encouraged by violence and rewarded, perhaps, with anonymity? When anonymity is threatened, is one's safety threatened as well? Josef's uncle berates him: "Do you want to lose this trial? Do you know what that means? It means you'll simply be crossed off. And that all your relatives will be drawn in, or at least dragged through the mud. Pull yourself together, Josef." (94).
        
        "His trial was not entirely unknown, although it wasn't quite clear who knew about it and how much. He hoped, however, that the rumor had not yet reached the vice president; otherwise there already would have been some clear sign of how, without the least regard for collegiality or common decency, he would use it against K." (132).
        
        The priest warns K.: "'Don't be too hasty,' said the priest, 'don't accept another person's opinion unthinkingly.'" (217)
- - - - "I had been forlorn among cruel insensitive step-relatives (the Princeton philosophers), abused and unappreciated; I had been saved by the unconquerable superhuman hero [a semitic man]," (151)
        
        "This is one of the great blessings of wealth, to be able to buy a scholar for a son-in-law and support him in the way of life one couldn't choose for oneself." (171)
- - - - How can a country claim itself peaceful in one context and act with such precise violence in another? How can a person, reflecting the ideals apparent in both contexts, do the same—and in peace be blind to one's own violence? Perhaps part of assimilating into a culture is adopting its hypocrisies. Perhaps the vitriol the Swede feels regarding his daughter is only a symptom of the American hypocrisies he has adopted and ignored.
        
        "You think you know what a man is? You have no idea what a man is. You think you know what a daughter is? You have no idea what a daughter is. You think you know what this country is? You have no idea what this country is. You have a false image of everything." (276)
- - - - Karloff, by expressing to Norman the pain inflicted on him by the Shoah, forces Norman to see him as a person with an intricate personal history. Norman is forced to realize that the filth in which Karloff lives is only an outward representation of Karloff's long anguished mental state. "And the thought of Karloff's approaching death suddenly filled Norman with dread. . . A hundred years of knowing! What an ant's life had Norman Moonbloom led! The aged presence compressed him." (161-2). By cleaning Karloff's apartment, making his outer life into something more livable, is Norman not trying to make Karloff's inner life more livable too? "He hoped to be distilled there in the reeking room with the ancient monstrosity peering at him, daring him to tamper with life and death." (162)
      - When trying to convince Gaylord to help him with the last task on his list, fixing Basellecci's wall, he says: "It's possible that I've become unhinged, deranged. . . It's all those people, Gaylord, all those people. For the first time, people entered me." (229). Coming out of his life of forced solitude, it seems crazy to Norman that he should care, suddenly, for other people. Still, much like his attempt to clean Karloff's apartment may be an attempt to help fix other pains in Karloff's life, fixing Basellecci's wall may be an attempt to help Basellecci with his physical ailments.
        
        This is, of course, an impossible feat. However, by attempting to help these people, he forges stronger and more meaningful connections with them—in this way he makes their worlds (and his own) better both physically and spiritually. "It was something as real and at the same time unreal as the hot coffee on his tongue. . . Or as real and unreal as sight, which takes in the huge depth of landscape with all its large movements and colors and planes and yet makes it all convincing in mysterious imprint on a dark whorl of tissue. . . Why, he was huge, united with all of them!" (244).