I WAS NOT AT ALL CERTAIN whether I had any advocates, I could not find out anything definite about it,” says a nameless narrator in the opening of a posthumously published text by Franz Kafka (CS, 449). Neither is there any certainty about the appropriate place to search: the labyrinth of corridors and staircases around the narrator suggests places for quiet contemplation, not a law court where advocates are typically found. Asking himself why he continues to look in this unlikely place, the narrator answers: “Because I was searching for an advocate everywhere; he is needed everywhere, if anything less in court than elsewhere” (CS, 450).

The narrator’s quest for advocates or Fürsprecher — literally speakers for someone or something — lays bare both the importance and elusiveness of proxies in Kafka’s work. Proxies claim to be authorized to act or speak for someone as agent, deputy, or substitute; in Kafka, they figure prominently but can be as easily overlooked and as difficult to grasp as the narrator implies. For two closely related reasons, the advocate-seeker’s disorientation invites the tracing of the proxy figure in Kafka’s professional and fictional writing. First, the narratological premise — the inherent need of narrating and narrator to have representatives — leads to questions of perspective and vocal agency. Second, the narrator’s institutional situation — the ambiguity as to where advocates are required — raises broad questions around the detachment between person and function, as well as the distinction and mediation between the individual and the legal-administrative world. Does he always need to be represented by another, or can he speak for himself? How is modern narrative authority distributed within the institutional framework?

These issues permeate much of Kafka’s writing in the context of what recent critical studies of his work have convincingly termed stories and poetics of the institution. Central among these studies is Rüdiger Campe’s identification of The Trial (Der Process, 1925) and The Castle (Das Schloss, 1926) as novels of the institution. Campe also analyzes the text around the advocate-seeker, stating that in order to speak of “life,” there needs to be an institutional basis or at least the search for it; and it is this construct that makes life as such a possible subject of narration.