Word: warder
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...down in oval concavities to half their thickness. He shuddered. How many feet must have trodden them in 30 years, how many footsteps must have scraped over them to wear out the stone to such a depth! Of every two who had passed that way one had been a warder, the other?a prisoner...
...Surely it is more frightening when there are no actual horrors; what is terrifying is the unchanging routine year after year. The horror is forgetting that your life?the only life you have?is destroyed, is in your willingness to forgive even some ugly swine of a warder, is in being obsessed with grabbing a big hunk of bread in the prison mess or getting a decent set of underwear when they take you to the bathhouse...
...novel's beginning, its hero, "Y," is incarcerated in a small room from which he is allowed to emerge once or twice a day in the company of a guard-and then only to visit a man who is either his warder or his psychiatrist. Y has come to think of this man as the Hen, and his prison as the Henhouse. At first, the sessions between Y and warder seem to be a form of psychotherapy. But there is something sinister in the Hen's objective; he seems to want Y to wallow in instances of minor...
...them pause to reflect that in France, the most sophisticated country on earth, one could watch the guillotine at work in the public streets with sadistic indifference, while here in New Holland the aborigine, the most primitive of all human beings, burst into tears when he watched a warder flogging a prisoner...
...fault is partly man's own, as Kafka sees it, because the lonely life is a breeding ground for new and universal crimes: torpor, mediocrity, the avoidance of the dare of love. In The Trial, the absolute appears as The Law; in The Castle, as the warder who never appears; in Amerika, as a promise extended but never fulfilled. The bitter loneliness Kafka suffered, Politzer says, was in quest for "the hope beyond hopelessness,'' "the glimmer of light Kafka knew existed...