NES English Language Arts (ELA) (301) Practice Test

The term describes a situation that feels absurd, nightmarish, and governed by an impersonal, labyrinthine bureaucracy—where reality seems distorted and individual agency is crushed. This meaning comes from Franz Kafka, whose writing, especially works like The Trial and The Metamorphosis, portrays sufferers trapped in opaque systems and illogical rules. Because his stories defined that blend of the surreal with the bureaucratic, the word kafkaesque is used to characterize similar experiences. The other authors—Albert Camus with existential questions, Marcel Proust with memory, James Joyce with experimental language—are influential in different ways, but they’re not the source of this term.