Comparing Before The Law And The Lottery

The fictional worlds of Franz Kafka’s Before the Law and Jorge Luis Borges’ The Lottery are built upon complex and expanding laws of chance that evolve to encompass the lives of the people who live themre. In both stories, a dichotomy is established between those in possession of the law, and those who are ruled below with very little comprehension of the laws that guide them. Though it would seem at first glance that the nobility and rulers benefit the most from these confusing and unjust systems of order, the characters of the stories perpetuate their own helplessness and allow secretive systems of justice to take over their whole lives. Both of these stories serve as parables, deconstructing the established rules of society and highlighting …show more content…
In Before the Law, the doorkeeper’s dare “to go in despite [his] veto,” noting that after his post each doorkeeper is “more powerful than the last,” is a threat veiled as a law (3). His word in reality means no more than that of the man, but the man places the doorkeeper above him and deifies his word as the truth. In building his understanding of the situation on a statement that may not be true, the man builds a castle in the air generating chaos out of his own fear of the unknown. Similarly, the Lottery itself begins as a “rudimentary” game, played “in broad daylight” by “commoners,” “with no further corroboration by chance” (102). It evolves slowly, on behalf of the people themselves, into a character itself. The changes in the system went “virtually unnoticed”, and the shift to include “nonpecuniary” elements developed from complaints filed by the people themselves: “Certain moralists argued that the possessionposession of coins did not always bring about happiness, and that other forms of happiness were perhaps more direct”(102-3). As a result, the lottery expands from winning or losing money to losing a tongue, or even one’s life. This change is entirely irrational because while a two silver coins in exchange for a gold one might make sense, cutting off a hand in exchange for playing a silly (and mandatory) game is illogical. The chaos from here expands until the Company has full control of society, and the drawings themselves become infinite, meaning that “no decision is final” and fate is “infinitely subdivisible”(105). Eventually, the Lottery takes over everything, leaving their “customs steeped in chance,” leaving the Babylonians no choice but to speculate whether the Company is still pulling their strings, or if the strings of fate are once again out