adjective

• Characteristic or reminiscent of the oppressive or nightmarish qualities of Franz Kafka's fictional world.

  ‘a Kafkaesque bureaucratic office’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Subway (Whitney Museum, New York) is perhaps his most famous work - a terrifying vision of Kafkaesque isolation.’
  • ‘To an outsider trying to decipher the roots of such conflicts, the situation is, well, Kafkaesque.’
  • ‘Thus begins Symmetry, a Kafkaesque story of Polish prison life.’
  • ‘It is easy to see why this idea appealed to Hitchcock, a man obsessed with the Kafkaesque idea of being falsely accused of a crime.’
  • ‘Virtually all were innocent, yet they found themselves in a Kafkaesque legal purgatory of secret evidence and charges that could never be challenged.’
  • ‘The Kafkaesque nightmare of indefinite detention without review has been the hallmark of fascist systems - not of the United States.’
  • ‘There, amid a Kafkaesque world of intrigue and betrayal, his medical skills became indispensable to the prison authorities.’
  • ‘The conversation had a Kafkaesque quality to it, which is to say, it smacked of police-state mentality and measures.’
  • ‘In her testimony, she described her brother's four-year-long ordeal as Kafkaesque.’
  • ‘In truly Kafkaesque fashion, he cannot find out how his name got on the "do-not-fly" list, nor how he would be able to get it removed.’