The Trial

European and Western disillusionment with life was at a peak after World War I. The twentieth century was supposed to be humanity’s greatest; instead, it was full of greater ways (think, nerve gas, machine guns, and trench warfare) for humans to destroy themselves. In this context, Kafka wrote this novel, published only after his death. In this story of an everyman, the dilemma of Josef K. (or just K.) raises the question of what we should do in face of life’s seeming meaninglessness.

By forces beyond his control and beyond even his cognition, K. is thrust into a trial. He maintains his innocence of the charges – though those charges seem vague and unspoken – but lacks an adequate defense team of lawyers. He falls in and out of show more love with several women; even love is fleeting and provides little hope. He is judged by a legal system that he cannot meaningfully interact with.

He has discussions with three mainstays of Western life – the law, the arts, and the church. All of them do not provide adequate explanations for how he ought to live life. The arts, symbolized by a painter, provided the most compelling narrative (one of clairvoyance, or “clear seeing”), but by hiding the paintings, K. even rejects that this gloomy reality should be celebrated.

In a manner reminiscent of original sin, he lives under the cloud of deadly forces that he cannot control. This sentence of an unfair death is one that everyone is born into and cannot escape. Despite protests of innocence, no one is permanently acquitted of their fate. Even the priest’s explanation seems confusing at best. The ending fittingly resolves this tension.

I could not help but feel empathy for Kafka in this novel. I also could not help but picture scores of Europeans killing each other in trenches. An entire generation of young men from all over the continent are suddenly gone. And for what? The status quo ante bellum? This disillusionment was shared all over the arts community and by the populous during this era. A “Lost” Generation, they were nicknamed.

This novel should not be read by those looking for hope because it contains little. Instead, it presents the realities of life squarely. Hope must be brought in by the reader through some external means or else despair will reign triumphant, much as it did after World War I. Nonetheless, the existential story sheds light on the seeming meaninglessness that life offers. Fortunately, the remainder of the twentieth century resulted in human progress. Though still not perfect (as Kafka so vividly reminds us), the human story is not over. show less

I'm sure there are as many ways to describe this novel as there are readers, but for me, I'm struck by how accessible and surrealistic it is.

The novel transforms from a tale of railing against bureaucracy into a quiet dystopian nightmare of shadowy conspiracy. K is awoken to his arrest, is subjected to inane bureaucracy, corruption, incomprehensible justice proceedings, and best of all, NO REASON.

In fact, we never get a reason why he is arrested or the purpose of the trial, but we are subjected to every stage of the nightmare in a way that could be the seven stages of grief or could be explained as a parable of the Self being subsumed by the State. Or perhaps just the natural progression of a natural person being replaced by the show more illusory. :)

Of course, it could also be read as a religious parable whereas we are never given a clear set of codes or if we are, the number of interpretations make the result absolutely meaningless and in the end, there IS NO RESOLUTION.

Or it could be as the surface intends, that we live in an increasingly complex system designed primarily to stifle and strangle us by the weight of its own importance.

We can read into it morals and promiscuity and even the Fall by Pride, too, but these are just the delicious mores and quagmires that K is subjected to. :)

Imminently readable and still as applicable today as it was back when it was written in 1914 and pubbed after Kafka's death, I am spoiled as a reader to read it for the first time now.

Am I blown away? Am I thrilled and in total love with his writing?

Yes. :) In fact, I'm going to knock this into my top one-hundred list of best novels of all time. :)

I am pretty damn amazed. It also turns out that I'm probably MOST influenced by him as an author even though I've never read him directly. Surrealism is FREAKING AMAZING.

It's the super-grandaddy of everything that makes dark horror, dystopian literature, and magical realism great.

Oh, and I've been told my own novel writing fits the bill. I think I'll own that. Sweet! :) show less

Basically, you are fucked! And there’s not much you can do about it. Sure, you can fret, or whine and cry, or may be even try putting up a brave fight. But that may or may not do much good to your case. Because things like these never really get resolved in life. Though, giving up everything and not doing anything is not an option either. That is to say you have absolutely no control over your situation. To use Kafka’s own words, “The best thing to do might be to come to terms with the circumstances…” and keep battling on with that faint glimmer of hope and reason that drive us.

Something or someone might come to your aid. It might look like a rescue. But then you can never be too sure how that might pan out. For all you know, show more it may only end up making your case even more miserable. Nobody seems to have made it till today. One thing is almost certain - there is no true acquittal here. Nope. That is simply out of the question. Of course, there are legends about people who have won the battle against this miserable universe, although they may be just that - legends. There might be certain element of truth to it though. Otherwise how could so many people believe in them? It’s just that no one to this day has ever actually encountered someone who has been truly acquitted. Though there is no surety that all is lost either. But you decide if it is a consolation or only more horrifying. For what more is to come? So you blindly navigate the alleys of life until one day you get put down, in Kafka’s words, like a dog.

Using the legal system as a façade, Kafka has described life as it is – mostly senseless and often brutal. There’s no direction to it and there is no end in sight. It’s terrifying and meaningless. May be that was the reason he didn't see much use in publishing his work and had ordered it to be burned after his death. The book is a trippy ride. Till you get half way through it seems like some bizarre dream and almost managed to leave me exasperated in the middle. Only after that will you start seeing some order in chaos. But by the time you begin to get a hold of it Kafka will fuck your mind inside-out and end it in the most unsatisfying manner. Don’t expect any closure here.

This book is a work of genius and nothing sums it up like Albert Camus’s quote about it on its back cover – “It is the fate and perhaps the greatness of The Trial that it offers everything and confirms nothing.” show less

On his 30th birthday, Josef K wakes up to officials in his apartment, there to arrest him. He doesn't know for what or how to defend himself. Over the next year, he continues his work at a bank while trying to defend himself against unknown charges in court. He learns all sorts of confusing things about how the legal system "works". Things do not end well for K.

This novel is an all-too-real-feeling look at people being controlled through chaos. If no one understands the systems they are living under, and if no one can predict who and what will be deemed illegal and dangerous, then no one is safe and secure to say what they think or be who they want to be. Pretty terrifying stuff and still oh so pertinent 100 years later.

The idea of being unexpectedly arrested for unspecified crimes and hauled away to stand trial is one we’re used to from reading about totalitarian regimes in history, particularly over the past 100 years, and from the arts. “The Trial” was published in 1925, a year after Franz Kafka’s death, and presages that.

There is a dark undercurrent knowing Kafka was a Jew in Prague shortly before Hitler would put the entire race on trial; Kafka didn’t live to see the Holocaust but his family did, and many of his relatives perished in concentration camps. This amplified the message and meaning of the book for me.

The frustration of battling an unseen legal bureaucracy is a much darker take on “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens; here show more “K” is battling for his life. As Steiner puts it in the introduction to this edition, “To live is to be sentenced for living.” However, despite all that great existential darkness, as with “The Metamorphosis”, it’s a book I didn’t particularly enjoy or would recommend. It’s a bit like required reading, only less creative than “The Metamorphosis”, published posthumously and unfinished, and painfully longer … so if you want a book of Kafka’s to read, I would recommend it instead of “The Trial.” show less

4/5

The only thing I have read that's even remotely similar to the The Trial is The Woman in the Dunes, which I suppose should be no great surprise since it seems that without the former, the latter would never have existed in its current form.

The Trial is the story of Josef K., a middle manager at a bank who is noteworthy only because he is suddenly arrested in his apartment on the day of his 30th birthday. For what, exactly? That remains a mystery for K, as well as his captors, investigators, lawyers, judges, a clergy member, a painter, or really anyone remotely involved in K's case. Everyone follows the template for their role that they 'should' be doing without any real idea of the truth behind it.

Kafka wrote The Trial in a style show more that I would mostly closely relate to stream of consciousness. Paragraphs are lengthy, and prone to large tangents that lead to totally new thoughts of their own. I thought this prose style suited both the content and the themes that Kafka chooses to explore. This is very much a story of and about nihilism. We see K as but a passenger on the tide of his case, despite his continued efforts. His advances are denied at every turn, driving his anxiety and confusion ever higher. It's a depressing and pitch black book even if the diction doesn't always do the heavy lifting to get to that tone.

It's a surreal world that K inhabits, with lots of maze-like spaces that have no clear defining lines, one that makes the already confusing events even more unbearable. Characters are prone to wild changes in emotion and action. It reads to me as a work of proto-magical realism, which I enjoyed greatly. It's also clear that Kafka was resentful of bureaucracy, resentful of the power that untold people can have over your life. Because this system of bureaucracy employs so many, each individual is free from personal accountability for their role in K's case. We are left with the impression that the wheels of this system will continue to grind the helpless and innocent into dust. This is a world devoid of purpose or morality. There's also certainly some more religious philosophy here, but these points are less clear to me, as I don't have much in the way of a religious background.

I find it hard to criticize The Trial in meaningful ways, not because there aren't flaws (it's quite literally unfinished), but because of the circumstances behind its creation and eventual publication. Kafka hated most of his own work, choosing to burn most of it before his death. The only reason that The Trial exists today is because of his literary executor going against Kafka's wishes to publish anything of his, period. These circumstances do feel like armor protecting the work from critique. Certainly it does become repetitive, dry, and boring. Certainly it does have an abrupt ending that flows against the grain of the rest of the text. It's not hard to see why some readers simply do not connect with the novel. Even I questioned my enjoyment several times.

However, I think it's hard to deny its weight and importance, a work that is valuable both because of its impact on future literature, but also on its own merits. Much like the The Woman in the Dunes I think that I would need to read this several more times with even more detail to tease it apart in a way that I could feel happy with. As it stands, I do feel like I'm only seeing the first few feet of a very deep lake. I'm interested to read more of Kafka's work as well as a biography of his life. show less

The Trial is the second novel I have read concurrently with its Cliffs Notes (Ulysses being the other), and I would recommend this to anyone brave (or foolish) enough to tackle Kafka for pleasure. Knowing that the novel remained unfinished at the time of Kafka's death - nearly a decade after he wrote it - and that his good friend had to guess at not only what to include but also the chapter order explains the fragmentary feeling conveyed by the story of Josef K. Written by a third-person narrator who remains as ignorant as K. of the justice system K. runs afoul of, The Trial is a labyrinth of incomplete, often contradictory information about the crime K. has committed. Even at the end, when K. is put to death, he knows neither the show more charge against him nor the reason for his conviction and punishment. He is equally ignorant of whether the many characters he interacts with help or hurt his cause; indeed, he cannot be sure what their true intentions were.

The Trial is the epitome of the term Kafkaesque, which Cambridge defines as "extremely unpleasant, frightening, and confusing". I would emphasize the last of these qualities. Even with the Cliffs Notes, I still don't grasp the story except on its opaque surface; the essays make clear that I never will, that there are multiple possible interpretations, none more or less acceptable than the others. Your understanding might be aided by a knowledge of Kafka's personal life and beliefs but will ultimately remain as unclear as Josef K.'s. show less