Abstract

Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death receives welcome, complementary illustrations in the novelistic efforts, respectively, of Franz Kafka (The Trial) and J.M. Coetzee (Elizabeth Costello). Both Kafka and Coetzee succeed in fashioning dramatic settings in which their protagonists may be seen and understood to suffer from the sickness unto death. In both cases, moreover, the distinctly spiritual character of despair is on display, as the protagonists in question slowly come to the realization that their cognitive faculties and resources will afford them no protection against, or immunity from, the despair they (correctly) see in others. Finally, both Kafka and Coetzee succeed in depicting the first-personal experience of despair as that of a progressively suffocating claustrophobia.