Court case over fired janitor prompts debate over meaning of ‘Kafkaesque’
FREDERICTON — A New Brunswick judge has stepped in to answer a question that has puzzled some of the world’s most prominent thinkers: What exactly does Kafkaesque mean?
In a new ruling, Justice Hugh McLellan defines Kafkaesque as the struggle “against rules and forces that cannot be understood.”
The word — arguably one of the most overused adjectives of our time — had become a fundamental issue in a case involving a Fredericton lab janitor fired in 2015 after he didn’t go to work for more than a month.
Paul Lynch had been jailed for his seventh drunk-driving-related conviction, and claimed to be unable to contact his bosses at the Doctor Everett Chalmers Hospital in Fredericton to tell them why he stopped going to work.