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Kafkaesque Laughter in the Face of Bureaucracy: David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

ABSTRACT One of the many conundrums of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King (2008) is its inclusion of a single sentence of direct quotation from Franz Kafka’s own unfinished novel, Amerika (1927). This article examines the textual and thematic links between the two novels, addressing Foster Wallace’s engagement with Kafka as a reader, teacher and writer by reading The Pale King alongside Amerika, but also in concert with Foster Wallace’s reflections upon Kafka’s texts. It argues that the two novels—and the two writers—are linked by their common critique of modern bureaucracy. Both The Pale King and Amerika approach bureaucracy comically, and this absurd laughter in the face of bureaucracy advocates for a specific vision of selfhood able to resist twentieth- and twenty-first-century bureaucratic culture.