Like Kafka s The Castle Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for gnostical turpitude an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail where he is visited by chimerical jailers an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner and by his in-laws who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When Cincinnatus is led out to be executed he simply wills his executioners out of existence: they disappear along with the whole world they inhabit.