In the second-to-last chapter of Der Prozess, K. is led to a cathedral, where he encounters a priest, who, as it turns out, serves the court system and knows of K.'s case. This priest berates K. for seeking too much external help (esp. from women), and explains that he has deluded himself in the court. In elaboration, he recites the parable Vor dem Gesetz (Before the Law), which he introduces as "a delusion mentioned in the opening texts of the law". K. and the priest then debate the meaning of the parable, the story told in which seems to parallel K.'s own plight.
SPOILER: Show
In the parable, Vor dem Gesetz, a man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to the law through a doorway. The doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says that it is possible. The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes, but tells the man that he accepts them "so that you do not think you have failed to do anything." The man waits at the door into old age. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years. The doorkeeper answers "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."
In the end, K. gives up the discussion despite holding disagreement with the priest because he is too tired and regards the story as something to be left to court officials to analyze. He asks to be shown the exit, and the priest, who had spoken with him amiably for the whole chapter, suddenly acts cold and distant. At this, K. inquires about this odd behavior, which leads to the following conclusion to the chapter, which, as will be recalled is in turn followed by the final scene of K.'s death. The text:
SPOILER: Show
"'Please, wait!'
'I'm waiting,' said the priest.
'Is there anything else you want from me?' asked K.
'No,' said the priest.
'You were so friendly to me earlier on,' said K., 'and you explained everything, but now you abandon me as if I were nothing to you.'
'You have to go,' said the priest.
'Well, yes,' said K., 'you need to understand that.'
'First, you need to understand who I am,' said the priest.
'You're the prison chaplain,' said K., and went closer to the priest, it was not so important for him to go straight back to the bank as he had made out, he could very well stay where he was.
'So that means I belong to the court,' said the priest. 'So why would I want anything from you? the court doesn't want anything from you. It accepts you when you come and it lets you go when you leave.'"
'I'm waiting,' said the priest.
'Is there anything else you want from me?' asked K.
'No,' said the priest.
'You were so friendly to me earlier on,' said K., 'and you explained everything, but now you abandon me as if I were nothing to you.'
'You have to go,' said the priest.
'Well, yes,' said K., 'you need to understand that.'
'First, you need to understand who I am,' said the priest.
'You're the prison chaplain,' said K., and went closer to the priest, it was not so important for him to go straight back to the bank as he had made out, he could very well stay where he was.
'So that means I belong to the court,' said the priest. 'So why would I want anything from you? the court doesn't want anything from you. It accepts you when you come and it lets you go when you leave.'"
This exchange between the amiable priest and K. mirrors Shinji's brief but monumental encounter with Kaworu. Already from the positions of the relevant figures there are parallels. In der Prozess, the protagonist K. is at his wit's end, having spent no small amount of his time and energy on trying to resolve the problem of his trial, to no avail. In Evangelion, Shinji is in a comparable state, having essentially repeated the same mission (kill Angels) for the last 23 episodes, with no improvement in his life and especially in his interpersonal relationships, despite the obedient fulfillment of his duty as a Pilot. On the other side, in Kafka's novel we have the priest, who speaks kindly and directly to K. (unlike other servants of the law, who are brusque and wooden) and wins his trust, and in Evangelion there is Kaworu, who befriends Shinji to the point that love can be spoken of.
It is clear to see that the priest and Kaworu serve as savior figures, and in both cases, the parting moment between the savior and saved is a difficult one for the latter but not the former. In der Prozess the priest declares his own behavior to be tied to the nature of the court, and thus lets K. go without any emotion or "wanting anything from him". In Evengelion, Kaworu, while not acting indifferent to Shinji, carries out a similar act of abandonment with the request for his death.
Going deeper, we see that much of what the priest describes in his warning against "self-delusion" also applies to Shinji, and that Kaworu's mannerisms that make him attractive to Shinji are also present in the priest. Before his recitation of the parable, the priest tells K. that he relies too much on "external help", "women", and that he "deludes himself in the court". These admonishments can be easily applied to Shinji: he doesn't have much of a personality besides following orders, he has severe gender-based or at least gender-aggravated problems with the three female leads, and he is servile to the whims of the NERV (and his father's) bureaucracy.
We have in the parable Vor dem Gesetz what I hold to be an unfettered glimpse into the core idea of Kafka's work, or at least the main idea of der Prozess. Basically, the problem described is a lack of self-agency, or the folly of trying to find a solution or "Law" for life. Even from the beginning of the story, it does not say "the man comes to enter the Law", rather, it says that the man asks to be let in, and indeed by the doorkeeper. Regarding this more broadly, it is the description of wanting something to be done for you rather than doing it yourself, i.e. an escapist process. Seeking "the Law" behind a series of gates and doorkeepers, if we mean "the Law" to mean something like a prescription for living, is fruitless.
Shinji seems to fall into the same trap as K. and the man from the countryside; constantly seeking support from others, which all turns out to be empty in the end. Throughout EoTV, a kind of "stationary setting" persists for most of the time; the setting is always the same city, with the same routines of killing angels, the same characters with little actual development, at least not in the conventional sense. Upon consideration, not just Shinji but most of the other characters can be seen to have the same lack of agency due to pursuit of what they see to be ideal realities, but which are unattainable; these range from the seemingly ambitious and self-determinate Asuka, who doesn't account for her inner weaknesses until it is too late, to Ritsuko, who follows her boss and lover loyally despite probably having the intellect to know the unwiseness thereof, to Rei, whose plight is impossibly simple: she sees no reason to live yet continues to do so.
It is an irony that the one character who possibly has the right idea about everything, that people can create Heaven or Hell based on their own hearts, is the late Yui. She too is the savior figure for Gendo, who perhaps out of all the cast goes to the most exorbitant length to keep her.
My laptop is out of batteries and I can't retrieve the power cable without waking up people who are sleeping. I'll conclude this OP here with the observation that:
- the novel der Prozess was never finished. There was argubly some stuff missing in the second half of the book, but the ending and the cathedral scene described above are intact.
- a similar thing happened to EoTV where we had episode 24 and then an abrupt and anticlimatic ending to the series, perhaps due to budget issues.
I'll have more thoughts later, hopefully.