Sexual Anxiety in Kafka's Novels

In the three unfinished novels by Franz Kafka there is a quick and understated burst of sexual energy exhibited by the male protagonists which color their disrupted universe. But, bizarrely, nothing more; the energy, summoned seemingly from a vacuum where dread and anxiety do not exist, is suddenly spent and the characters display a limp attitude in pursuing another sexual episode with the same partner. As Kafka's mastery of form progresses, so too do his characters in their maturity towards sex and sexual impulses. From Karl Rossmann's flawed, youthful innocence in Amerika, to Joseph K.'s debauched arrogance and infidelities in The Trial, and finally to Land-Surveyor K.'s full-frontal relationship with Frieda in The Castle, the Kafka protagonist suffers time and time again from the subterfuge of his initial sexual compulsion. In this paper, I will avoid the personal, autobiographical, fashionable doorstopping details of Kafka's own relationships, which are distracting and distancing from the works themselves (for example, is it at all beneficial that in writing the Fraulein Burstner character in The Trial, Kafka shortened her name to F.B. on the manuscript, based from his own on-again, off-again fiancée Felice Bauer? No.); instead I hope to penetrate only in a textual analysis, into the works themselves.

In Kafka's first novel Amerika, Karl Rossmann has already committed his first sexual act, thus the trip to the United States:

As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself a child by him… (Amerika, 3)