Franz Kafka "The Trial"

 

Iliyana Benina, Nikola Benin

  

Franz Kafka's "The Trial" is one of the defining works of twentieth-century literature. Written between 1914 and 1915, the novel was left unfinished at the time of Kafka's death from tuberculosis in 1924. It was published posthumously in 1925 by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, who ignored Kafka's instruction to destroy the manuscript. The book has since become a cornerstone of modernist fiction, widely recognized for creating the adjective "Kafkaesque" – a term that describes situations of surreal, nightmarish bureaucracy, oppressive and incomprehensible authority, and existential helplessness.

Plot Overview

The story opens with one of the most famous first sentences in literature: "Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning."

Josef K. is a thirty-year-old chief clerk at a bank – respectable, ambitious, and orderly. On the morning of his thirtieth birthday two warders enter his room in a boarding house and announce his arrest. They do not tell him the nature of the charge, they do not handcuff him, and they allow him to continue his daily life. The arrest is strangely partial: he is under suspicion, yet free to go to work, meet people, and attempt to defend himself.

From this point the narrative follows K.'s increasingly frantic efforts to understand and confront the accusation. He attends preliminary hearings held in crowded tenement attics, where the proceedings feel chaotic and theatrical. He speaks with various court officials, most of whom are petty, corrupt, or simply incomprehensible. He hires an advocate named Huld, whose illness and endless delays achieve nothing. He meets the court painter Titorelli, who explains the hopeless categories of possible outcomes: definite acquittal (almost never granted), ostensible acquittal (temporary), and indefinite postponement.

Women appear repeatedly in ambiguous roles – the washerwoman Leni, the landlady, the court usher's wife — often offering sexual or emotional connection that seems tied to the court itself. In one of the novel's most discussed chapters, K. enters a cathedral and meets a priest who tells him the short parable "Before the Law": a man from the country spends his entire life waiting at the gate of the Law, only to be told at the moment of his death that the gate was intended for him alone.

The accusation is never revealed. The process slowly consumes K.'s energy, confidence, and sense of self. In the final chapter, on the eve of his thirty-first birthday, two executioners collect him from his lodgings. They take him to a quarry outside the city, turn him over, and stab him to death with a butcher's knife. His last words form a bitter, ironic comment: "Like a dog!"

Major Themes

The Trial explores several interlocking ideas that have remained powerfully resonant.

The absurdity of bureaucracy and authority is central. The court is simultaneously omnipotent and ridiculous – vast yet disorganized, terrifying yet comically inefficient. Officials are everywhere and nowhere; the system seems designed to exhaust and humiliate rather than to deliver justice. Many readers see this as a satire of the Austro-Hungarian civil service Kafka knew from his own work as an insurance lawyer, while others view it as a prophetic vision of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes.

Guilt – both existential and undefined – runs through the book. K. begins convinced of his innocence, yet gradually internalizes a sense of wrongdoing he cannot name. The novel asks whether guilt is something one commits or something one simply is. Some interpretations read the charge as original sin, others as the inevitable consequence of living in a dehumanizing modern world.

Alienation and loss of agency are constant. K. starts as a confident, rational man who believes logic and hard work will solve any problem. The court strips away that illusion, leaving him isolated and powerless. The people around him – even those who seem to help — only deepen his confusion.

The unknowable nature of truth and interpretation is dramatized most clearly in the parable "Before the Law" and the priest's endless commentary on it. Meaning slips away the harder one tries to grasp it. The novel refuses to provide a single explanation, mirroring the experience of its protagonist.

Sexuality and power appear frequently, often in unsettling ways. Women connected to the court seem to offer access or distraction, yet their involvement usually leads K. further into entanglement rather than liberation.

Style and Structure

Kafka's prose is calm, precise, and almost clinical — a deliberate contrast to the surreal events it describes. This flatness heightens the horror and the dark humor. The unfinished state of the manuscript adds to the sense of incompleteness: chapters were arranged by Max Brod, and scholars still debate the ideal order. The lack of resolution feels appropriate rather than accidental.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Since its publication "The Trial" has been read through many lenses: existentialist, psychoanalytic, theological, political, and autobiographical. Early commentators often linked it to Kafka's difficult relationship with his father, his Jewish identity, his tuberculosis, and his repeated broken engagements. Later readings emphasized its anticipation of surveillance states, show trials, and administrative cruelty.

The book influenced writers such as Albert Camus, George Orwell, Harold Pinter, and countless others. It has been adapted into films (notably Orson Welles's 1962 version starring Anthony Perkins and a 1993 film with a Harold Pinter screenplay), theater pieces, and operas.

Today "The Trial" feels disturbingly contemporary. In an era of algorithmic decision-making, opaque institutional power, indefinite legal limbo, and pervasive feelings of guilt without clear cause, the novel reads less like historical fiction and more like a continuing diagnosis of modern life.

Recommended Translations

English readers have several strong options. The translation by Breon Mitchell (1998, Schocken Books), based on restored German text, is widely praised for accuracy and clarity. Earlier versions by Willa and Edwin Muir (1935, revised 1956) remain influential and readable, though they reflect an older editorial arrangement. More recent editions continue to appear, with some publishers offering fresh translations in the 2020s.

"The Trial" is not an easy or comforting book. It offers no answers, only questions that linger long after the final page. Yet that refusal to resolve is precisely what makes it endure – a mirror held up to systems and selves we still struggle to understand.