Amanda Knox, Kafka's The Trial and Camus's The Rebel

Franz Kafka's The Trial is a metaphorical novel of a man caught in a bureaucratic maze of a totalitarian criminal justice system.

It's an old metaphore on bureaucracies, and how these impersonal, top-down organizations smother the human spirit.

Albert Camus's The Rebel is an existiential essay on what forces a man to revolt; to proclaim his humanity in the midst of total subservience to the state, or state bureaucracies.

As the appeal trial of Amanda Knox winds down by Monday, the Kafka and Camus writings bear reflection.

A young British student, Meredith Kercher, was murdered. That is a tragedy.

And an American attending college in Italy, Amanda Knox, was accused, and sentenced to 25 years for the murder.

In a surreal Kafka-like tale, Knox was accused of being a sex-obessed, drug-addled murderer.
The Peruiga prosecutor, Minini(?), is a character out of Kafka's bureaucractic nighmare.
He needed to find the killers, or killer, and he focused in on Knox and her boyfriend.

Under normal circumstances, Amanda Knox should have revolted, Camus-like, as she faced this ordeal.
Instead, the past 3 years in the Italian prison has shown her to be the opposite of the prosecutor's protrait of a femme fatale, a she-devil.

How many of us would have reacted in such a calm manner?

The appeal decision is expected Monday.
The odds seem to be more than 50% that Knox will be found not guilty; and allowed to return home to the State of Washington.

That would be a victory for the human spirit; and a defeat for the deary, dark bureaucracies that make up our lives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_(book)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial