Mon nom est Personnage

Cyrille Martinez’s Josef parK, part of Premier Parallèle’s series ‘La vie rêvée des personnages,’ offers a critical study of Kafka’s Josef K. from The Trial, exploring how to understand a literary character without identification. The essay combines scholarly analysis with fictional elements, rejecting the Nabokovian imperative toward reader identification. By positioning Josef K.—the quintessential ordinary man haunted across twentieth and twenty-first century literature—as a figure of negative charisma and pure potentiality, Martinez examines what draws us to this effaced protagonist. The work engages with Kafka’s existential vision and the character’s philosophical significance, contributing to post-modern literary theory and the critique of conventional reading practices central to contemporary critical discourse.

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