THE TRIAL

FRANZ KAFKA
 The Trial

• original German title: Der Process,

• later Der Prozess,

• is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914

and 1915 but not published until 1925.
• One of Kafka's best-known works

• the story of a man arrested and

prosecuted

• by a remote, inaccessible authority,

• with the nature of his crime revealed

neither to him nor the reader
• Like Kafka's other novels, The Trial was never
completed,
• although it does include a chapter which
brings the story to an end.
• Because of this, there are some
inconsistencies and discontinuities in
narration within the novel, such as disparities
in timing.
• After Kafka's death in 1924 his friend and
literary executor Max Brod edited the text for
publication by Verlag Die Schmiede.

• The original manuscript is held at the

Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am
Neckar, Germany.
• In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde's

100 Books of the Century

• 2nd Best German Novel of the Twentieth

Century.
 Characters
• Josef K. – The protagonist

• Fräulein Bürstner – A boarder in the same

house as Josef K. She is at first indulgent
towards him but later rebuffs his advances.
• Fräulein Montag– Friend of Fräulein Bürstner,
she talks to K. about ending his relationship
with Fräulein Bürstner after his arrest.

• She claims she can bring him insight,

because she is an objective third party.
• Willem and Franz – Officers who arrest K. one
morning but refuse to disclose the crime he is
said to have committed.

• Inspector – Man who conducts a proceeding

at Joseph K.'s boarding house to inform K.
officially that he is under arrest.
• Rabinsteiner, Kullich and Kaminer – Junior
bank employees who attend the proceeding
at the boarding house.

• Frau Grubach – The proprietress of the

lodging house in which K. lives. She holds K.
in high esteem, despite his arrest.
• Woman in the Court – In her house happens
the first judgment of K. She claims help from
K. because she doesn't want to be abused by
the magistrates.

• Student – Deformed man who acts under

orders of the instruction judge. Will be a
powerful man in the future.
• Uncle Karl – K.'s impetuous uncle from the
country, formerly his guardian. Upon learning
about the trial, Karl insists that K. hire Herr
Huld, the lawyer.
• Instruction Judge – First Judge of K. In his
trial, he confuses K. with a Wall Painter.
• Herr Huld, the Lawyer – K.'s pompous and
pretentious advocate who provides precious
little in the way of action and far too much in
the way of anecdote.
• Leni – Herr Huld's nurse, she has feelings for
Josef K. and soon becomes his lover. She shows
him her webbed hand, yet another reference to
the motif of the hand throughout the book.
Apparently, she finds accused men extremely
attractive—the fact of their indictment makes
them irresistible to her.
• Albert – Office director at the court and a

friend of Huld.

• Flogger – Man who punishes Franz and

Willen in the Bank after K's. complaints

against the two agents in his first Judgement.

• Vice-President – K.'s sycophantic rival at the
Bank, only too willing to catch K. in a
compromising situation. He repeatedly takes
advantage of K.'s preoccupation with the trial
to advance his own ambitions.
• President – Manager of the Bank. A sickly
figure, whose position the Vice-President is
trying to assume.
• Rudi Block, the Merchant – Block is another
accused man and client of Huld. His case is
five years old, and he is but a shadow of the
prosperous grain dealer he once was.
• Manufacturer – Person who hears about K.'s
case and advises him to see a painter who
knows how the court system works.
• Titorelli, the Painter – Titorelli inherited the
position of Court Painter from his father. He
knows a great deal about the comings and
goings of the Court's lowest level. He offers
to help K., and manages to unload a few
identical landscape paintings on the accused
man.
• Priest – Prison chaplain whom K. encounters
in a church. The priest advises K. that his case
is going badly and tells him to accept his fate.

• Doorkeeper and Farmer – The characters of

the Chaplain's Tale.
• Kafka presents the story in third-person point
of view from Joseph K.'s perspective.

• The narrator reveals K.'s thoughts but avoids

revealing the thoughts of the other
characters except on rare occasions.
• In Chapter One we find Frau Grubach is
talking with Joseph K and we find that “she
said something that she certainly did not
intend and certainly was not appropriate."
 Theme 1

• A man has no alternative but to accept this

destiny. In The Trial, the force or entity is
ostensibly the government and symbolically
fate, divine will, luck—in fact, anything or
anyone that rules humans by whim or
caprice.
• In King Lear, Shakespeare sums up this
theme when Gloucester observes, “As flies to
wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us
for their sport.”
 Theme 2

• The Trial is a visionary novel that warns

civilization, wittingly or unwittingly, of the
coming tyranny of totalitarian governments
in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Fascist
Italy.
• It also attacks governments of every kind,
whether Democratic or otherwise, that rely
on clumsy bureaucracies to conduct day-to-
day affairs.
 Theme 3
• The combined forces of fate and faceless big
government isolate Joseph K., making him
feel lonely, abandoned, friendless.

• His enemies have cornered him, and he has

no weapons with which to fight back and no
champions to come to his rescue.
 Theme 4

• Original sin burdens man with inherited guilt

and holds him accountable for that guilt.
According to the Old Testament of the Bible,
Adam and Eve committed the first sin and
passed it on to their descendants, the rest of
the human race.
• In this sense, Joseph K. is guilty of an
"inherited crime." He is held accountable for
it because he inherited it.
 Climax of the novel
• The climax of a narrative work can be defined
as
• (1) the turning point at which the conflict
begins to resolve itself for better or worse, or
as
• (2) the final and most exciting event in a
series of events.
• The climax of The Trial occurs, according to
the first definition, when Joseph K. realizes
that his fate is sealed after the priest in the
cathedral tells him, "You don't need to
accept everything as true, you only have to
accept it as necessary."
• Joseph responds, "Depressing view. The lie
made into the rule of the world."
• According to the second definition, the
climax occurs in the final chapter when
Joseph K., having accepted his fate, willingly
allows two men to escort him through the
streets to a stone quarry, where they execute
him.
• K's behavior with both Fraülein Bürstner and
Leni suggests that he is trying to take control
of destiny while the government is wrestling
it from him.
• Ironically, however, his behaviour could also
indicate that he is losing control of his own
emotions.
• Huld says he is getting weaker every day. His
illness appears to represent the condition of
justice in the oppressive country. The more
power the government vests unto itself, the
weaker the justice system becomes.
• Citizens like K. become entangled in
interminable legal proceedings without
knowing the nature of the charge against
them and appear to have little hope of
receiving a just settlement of their cases.
 Theme of Isolation
• After K.'s encounter with Fraülein Bürstner,
she manages to avoid him even though they
live in the same apartment building. She does
not respond to his overtures and finally, her
new roommate, Fräulein Montag acts as a go-
between to tell K. that Bürstner does not
wish to seek K. again.
• Bürstner's rejection of K. helps to develop the
theme of K.'s isolation and alienation.
 Style and Content
• The Trial is a dark and. depressing novel.
• Kafka's bone-dry wit and flair for surreal
humor–an example of which occurs in a
passage in which he meets an attractive
woman but discovers she has webbed hands–
are unsurpassed in Twentieth Century
literature.
• In "The Metamorphosis," as in The Trial,
Kafka's eccentric humour tempers the edge
of the phantasmagorical circumstances in
which the protagonist finds himself..
• For example, Samsa wonders whether he can make

it to work walking on so many spindly legs

• Kafka's ability to write humour into a ridiculously

surreal story is a hallmark of his style.

Both Gregor Samsa and Joseph K. are

innocent victims of an uncaring society

 Kafka and Expressionism

• Franz Kafka is frequently identified with the

early 20th Century expressionism. In
literature, expressionism is a movement or
writing technique in which a writer depicts a
character’s feelings about a subject
• (or the writer’s own feelings about it) rather
than the objective surface reality of the
subject. A writer, in effect, presents his
interpretation of what he sees.
• When Joseph K. perceives reality, he sees it
through the lens of his mind’s eye. A scene
that may appear normal or even cheerful to
another character may appear bleak and
depressing to him.
• Moreover, the outward appearance of a
person, place, or thing may not reflect its
true essence in the first place.
• Expressionist writers often present the real
world as bizarre, fantastic, and nightmarish
because that is how they, or the characters in
their works, see the world. Their distortions
are the real world.
 Study Questions and Essay Topics

• Why did Kafka name The Trial's protagonist

Joseph K. but give other characters a last
name?
• In a good dictionary, look up [Link]
discuss or write about experiences of yours,
including dreams, that you would describe as
Kafkaesque.
• If you were in Joseph K's place, what action
would you take to exonerate yourself?

• Does the government justice system in The

Trial resemble in any way the justice system
in present-day America or any other country?
Explain your answer.
• Are Joseph K.'s encounters with women in
The Trial based on author Kafka's encounters
with women? Explain your answer.

• Does Joseph K. resemble his creator, Franz

Kafka?
• When The Trial was published in 1925,
totalitarianism was taking root in Italy,
Germany, and the Soviet Union (Russia).
What is totalitarianism?

• In what ways are totalitarian governments

similar to the government in The Trial?
 Biographical Information

• Franz Kafka was well primed to write a novel

about an isolated individual.
• His father despised him,
• he never married,
• and he was a Jew at a time when anti-
Semitism was gaining sway again in Europe.
 Biographical Information
• .Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague
(now part of the Czech Republic but then part
of Austria-Hungry).
• When he was an adolescent, he was a good
student, but he disliked the traditional,
hidebound, authoritarian approach to
education at his school, the Altstädter
Staatsgymnasium.
• Although he later earned a law degree at the
Charles University in Prague, he did not
practice law but instead worked in Prague for
an insurance company and then for an
insurance institute.
• He found insurance work tedious.
• Nevertheless, he did his job well, earning the
respect of colleagues, and remained an office
worker until 1923, when he moved to Berlin to
pursue writing.
• By then, however, he was suffering from
tuberculosis and died the following year.
• Throughout his life, he was never close to his
parents, Hermann Kafka and Julie Löwy Kafka.

• His father, a successful merchant, was a tyrant

who bullied Franz psychologically.

• In some ways, the court system in The Trial

represents the negative influence of Hermann
Kafka on his son.
• Although Kafka had relationships with
several women, one to whom he was
engaged, he never married. At the end of his
life, Kafka was almost completely isolated–
from his family, from a regular job and the
companionship of co-workers, from the wife
that he never had, and from anti-Semitic
Germans whose language he wrote in.
• He tried desperately to find God—whom he
regarded as an "indestructible" reality—but
felt that God remained distant from him. He
did have one close friend.
• Max Brod, an essay writer, drama critic, and

novelist who published Kafka's works after

he died even though Kafka had told him to

destroy all of his manuscripts.

• Among Franz Kafka's other works are
Meditation (1913), The Judgment (1912), The
Metamorphosis (1915), In the Penal Colony
(1919), A Hunger Artist (1922), The Castle
(1926), and Amerika (1927).

• He died on June 3, 1924, at Kierling, Austria.