How to Use Kafkaesque in a Sentence

Kafkaesque

adjective
  • Yet on a deeper level, there is also something Kafkaesque about it all.
    — Jeremy Eichler, BostonGlobe.com, 2023-05-13
  • The Kafkaesque conditions of the system have led baseball fans into a life of crime.
    — Kaitlyn Tiffany, The Atlantic, 2023-07-06
  • Galchen has a Kafkaesque sense of the way the exercise of authority inflates egos and twists logic.
    — Washington Post, 2021-06-01
  • This Kafkaesque situation risks other countries not wishing to remove flammable cladding, says Rein.
    — Alex Christian, WIRED, 2024-03-01
  • Many episodes circle around a scandal in Guantánamo’s history to draw out the brutally Kafkaesque nature of life on the inside.
    — Nicholas Quah, Vulture, 2024-05-02
  • And Nagayama’s nervy portrayal, like a cosmic baton of Kafkaesque anguish handed off to him, keeps us just as riveted to a possible injustice.
    — Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times, 2023-12-01
  • The process of applying for a green card while living in the U.S. is a Kafkaesque one, and, during the time that the application is being processed, you are not allowed to leave the country.
    — Deborah Treisman, The New Yorker, 2023-06-19
  • The Productivity Paradox Haly’s future is snagged in a heartbreaking and maddening plot twist, one that may seem all too familiar in our Kafkaesque healthcare system.
    — Naveen Rao, Forbes, 2024-10-22
  • Even at their most whimsical, in some ways, the film’s magical realist touches aren’t far off from the reality of the US immigration system, where Kafkaesque absurdities abound.
    — Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN, 2024-03-23
  • This defiant and entertaining work playfully uses headshots and avatars to visualize clandestine audio recordings documenting years of Kafkaesque impositions, threats, and vital dissident art.
    — Samantha Bergeson, IndieWire, 2025-02-10
  • Indeed, aspects of the asylum process that Schmidtke, Isha, and Samina recounted sounded more like a sadist’s fantasy vision of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy than rational immigration policy.
    — Ali Breland, The New Republic, 2023-04-26

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'Kafkaesque.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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