What kind of man has illicit sensual relations with his neighbor, his lawyer’s nurse, and a random washerwoman that he met on a Sunday morning? Certainly not a guilty one. So claims Joseph K, who one morning wakes up under arrest. What’s odd about this situation is that no one knows, not even K. himself, what he is under arrest for, and when he questions the Inspector about the absurdity of his situation, the Inspector’s uninformative responses only serve to further aggravate him.
K is the main character of the 1925 novel The Trial by Franz Kafka. As evidenced by the title, the novel depicts a trial, specifically the trial of Joseph K. for an unnamed crime, the nature of which remains completely obscure and vague throughout the novel. From the start of the story with K’s unjustified arrest to his execution at the end, The Trial seems to be a stark depiction of the helplessness of individuals under totalitarian government, as K is thrown into the Court system and given the impossible task of proving his innocence without even knowing what he’s being accused of. To make matters worse, the Court system in The Trial is revealed to be a relentless death machine, designed to entrap and consume individuals like K. At certain points in the story, K believes himself to be making decent progress on his case, but upon closer inspection realizes that his struggles are meaningless; for instance, at K’s first hearing, he makes a convincing speech that seemingly wins over the audience at the Court, but soon realizes that the “audience” was simply a group of corrupt Court officials pretending to show support for him for entertainment. Throughout his case, K continues to make endless appeals for his innocence, even enlisting the help of a lawyer to aid him in his case, but he soon realizes that his appeals have no effect on the outcome of his case. As a result, K begins to lose hope in his case, and his worst fears are soon confirmed — Titorelli, a Court painter, tells him that the Court never acquits those that it accuses of being guilty. His continuous struggles against the impenetrable Court all start with a surge of hope but lead him back to square one, and the more he struggles, the more K uncovers about the true nature of the Court — it is a system that is absolutely absurd and immune to logic, leading to dead ends each time K tries to escape it. The story ends with two executioners taking K to an abandoned quarry and ending his life.
The Trial is bizarre, irrational, and surreal. It is disorienting and nightmarishly uncanny, but absolutely real. This is the nature of the Kafkaesque. From beginning to end, The Trial inspires an unsettling feeling in readers - a sense that something is not quite right. We get the feeling that something sinister is at work behind the scenes.
That “something” turns out to be the Court. In The Trial, the Court is almost a supernatural force, impenetrable and unyielding to the logic of the individual. It is something that ordinary humans have no control over, a towering hierarchy that looms over its victims ominously, watching their every move and planning their demise behind closed curtains. The irrationality of the Court is reflected in the irrationality of the characters, such as the priest, who at first shows sympathy for K’s situation and tells him a parable that is meant to explain his predicament but in reality only confuses him, and Leni the nurse, who has an inexplicable attraction to “accused men” and seduces K the first chance she gets. Throughout the story, it seems that K is the only sane person, the only person who truly realizes the insanity of the Court and the absurdity of his trial.
The events of the story, too, have a bizarre quality. When K takes a tour of the Court’s offices, he gets lost almost immediately, sending him into a state of confusion, even though he has barely walked “halfway down the lobby.” K’s disorientation in the Court offices is symbolic of the disorienting complexity of the Court system - the Kafkaesque-ness of it all. The top of the Court hierarchy is hidden behind layers upon layers upon layers of meaningless and redundant bureaucracy, far beyond the reach of K. The Court is a system so vast and complex that it has lost all semblance of logic, existing not to serve justice through logical examination but to crush and consume individuals in order to keep itself alive. In the end, K’s struggles against such a system are futile and absurd.
Having passed away in 1924, Kafka never lived to see the horrors of mid-20th century Europe. He never could’ve possibly imagined the insanity of the Nazi concentration camps, the rise of totalitarianism in Soviet Russia, and the horrors of Japanese internment camps in America. But somehow, he describes them perfectly in The Trial - absurd, nightmarish, Kafkaesque systems designed simply to stomp out the lives of individuals underfoot with no regard to logic or sense of any kind. Even today, a century later, our world is just as Kafkaesque as the world of The Trial. Like K, we are plagued daily by the senselessness, cruelty, and absurdity of our prison and justice system, of big government, and of capitalism. These unseen forces dictate our lives, leaving each of us helpless and confused. Take a look around – see if you notice the Kafkaesque in your own life.