Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
-Opening of The Trial
The Trial documents six months or so in the life of Joseph K., an everyday Bank employee who wakes up one morning to discover himself arrested by the Court. But it’s a curious sort of arrest: he is in fact absolutely free and aside from the day of his arrest no constraints are placed on his behavior. What is his crime? They can’t tell him, and perhaps don’t even know. The courts themselves are only the attics of run-down tenements and the Law books consist of pornography. Beyond each level of the Court there is another level, but all of them are closed to Joseph K.
It’s a little bit like the climactic trial of Alice in Wonderland, except deadly serious: the Court does seem to operate on a “verdict first, trial after” basis and in some ways the revelations about the Court and the Law do seem to run toward the reveal that they all are, after all, a mere bunch of playing cards. Whenever it seems that Joseph K. is on the verge of breaking through to the truth about his trial another point of confusion arises instantly, and by the end of it all the reader is not going to know much more about Joseph K.’s crime than he does himself.
In fact at a certain point Joseph K. seems to even give up even trying to know that much – all he really wants is resolution, something repeatedly denied to him. The only way to win, it seems, is not to lose, and to prolong a case indefinitely. But this doesn’t sit well with Joseph K., and so the story of The Trial is mostly the story of his desperate search for a way to reach a true acquittal, or at least an end of some kind.
The world of The Trial is bleak and absurd, claustrophobic and dirty. And Joseph K.’s increasing desperation seems almost like one more joke. No one else really understands his horror and no one else sees the stupidity of his position. Very late into the book Joseph K. meets a tradesman named Block whose case has existed in an indefinite, unknown state for five years, and the visible effect the waiting has had on him is perhaps the most horrifying image in a book full of darkness.
The Trial itself is unfinished, but its ending seems to be intact: bits and pieces are missing from chapters, but the narrative is coherent. This may merely be due to Max Brod, a personal friend of Kafka’s to whom we owe most of Kafka’s surviving work: in any case, it tells a complete story. The climax of the book really takes place in the penultimate chapter, however, when Joseph K. is confronted with a prison chaplain in a more-or-less empty cathedral. After this chapter, which is not only the climax but the artistic highpoint of the entire story, the final chapter feels almost like an afterthought.
Though The Trial itself is not very long, the cramped mood that pervades the story and Kafka’s crazy, meandering writing style produce an effect of having lived in this distorted world for ages; after finishing The Trial the feeling of most people will probably be that of emerging from a long dark tunnel. But The Trial offers no light; its vision is unrelenting and uncompromising and the ending of the book stays true to the ugly farcical quality of its beginning.
-Flaed
