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........While lying in bed one morning in his room at a boardinghouse, Joseph K., a thirty-year-old bank clerk, wonders why the cook has not brought him breakfast at the usual time, about eight o’clock. Irritated he rings for his landlady. When the door opens, a strange man named Willem appears at the threshold. ........“Who are you?” ........Willem does not respond. ........When K. says he has been expecting his breakfast, Willem repeats K’s statement to another man, Franz, in an adjoining room. Franz and Willem laugh. Then they inform K. he is under arrest. Dumbfounded, K. cannot think of a single thing he did wrong. Someone must have told lies about him. When he presses them for information, they tell him that they are not there to explain why he is to be held, only that he is being held. After K. asks to see a warrant, all they do is tell him he must resign himself to the fact that he is under arrest. ........An inspector arrives and everyone convenes in the room of another tenant, Fraülein Bürstner, a typist, who is not home. The inspector questions him further but refuses to disclose the reason for K’s arrest. Frustrated, K. paces and asks whether he may call an attorney. The inspector does not object, but says it would be senseless to do so. K. decides not to make the call. ........When the men leave, they surprise K. by telling him he is free to go about his daily affairs as usual, including reporting for work at his bank. Bewildered, K. thinks being under arrest may not be such a terrible thing. Of course, there will be a trial, preceded by hearings.  ........In
the evening when he returns from work, K. apologizes to the landlady, Frau
Gruber, for being the cause of the commotion that morning. She seems unconcerned
and tells K. not to take the incident seriously. When he leaves for Fraülein
Bürstner’s room, Frau Gruber informs him that she is still out.
........“Is there something you need from her?” she says. ........K. explains that he wanted to apologize to her, too, because the morning interrogation was conducted in her room. Frau Gruber tells him he need not do so; Fraülein Bürstner’s room has already been tidied up. When K. observes that the Fraülein Bürstner often stays out late, Frau Gruber gossips about her, saying she has seen her with different men in other neighborhoods. After 11:30, Fraülein Bürstner returns and K. describes the morning’s events. She seems unconcerned until she complains that several photographs are out of order. When K. tells her he does not know why he is being held, she says, “Then you should not have come in here at such a late hour.” But K. continues to talk about the interrogation and even demonstrates where the interrogators stood. When they hear a loud bang on a door to an adjoining room, where Frau Gruber’s nephew is staying, Fraülein Bürstner worries that she and K. are causing a disturbance and tells K. to leave. In the hallway, he impulsively kisses her on the lips, face, and neck; she seems impassive, uncaring. ........At work, K. receives a telephone call to report on Sunday for the first of a series of hearings. When he arrives at the address, he discovers that the building is a tenement house. Guttersnipes playing marbles on the steps block his way. One of them grabs a leg of his trousers to prevent him from continuing on until a marble reaches its destination. K. does not protest for fear of causing a scene. ........Once inside, he goes from room to room to find the court. Each time a door opens to his knock, he pretends that he is looking for a carpenter while he looks inside to see whether he has discovered the court. ........“Does a carpenter named Lanz live here?” ........He repeats the question again and again, mainly to housewives tending children. Sometimes the housewives repeat the question to others within. ........“Does a carpenter named Lanz live here?” ........When he finally finds the court, the magistrate scolds him for his tardiness and wants to know whether he is a house painter. At wit’s end, K. harangues the court, receiving applause from the spectators seated before the bench. He leaves. K. returns to the court the following Sunday but makes no progress. In the hallways of the building are others awaiting hearings. On the recommendation of his uncle, K. sees an attorney, Dr. Huld, who is sick in bed but is well informed about K.’s case. The attorney’s nurse, Leni, gets K.’s attention and makes a pass. After urging K. to confess to his crime, she inquires about his girlfriend, a waitress named Elsa, and asks whether she has a webbed hand like Leni. Dr. Huld, meanwhile, is unable to remedy K.’s problem and, after six months, his case is where it was on the first day–nowhere. At the bank, one of his customers, a manufacturer, furtively tells K., “I heard about your trial from a painter named Titorelli.” According to the manufacturer, Titorelli makes most of his income painting portraits of judges and, over time, has learned about the inner workings of the justice system. He might be able to advise K. When K. visits him, Titorelli tells him that it is impossible to gain outright acquittal. Instead, he must prolong the case by gaining a temporary acquittal, then a new trial, then another temporary acquittal, then another new trial, and so on. In the end, Titorelli is no help at all, and K. leaves–after buying several landscape paintings that he doesn’t really want. ........When K. returns to see Dr. Huld, his nurse, Leni, is in the kitchen with another client, a grain merchant named Rudi Block. Apparently Leni and Block have been flirting–or more. K. asks whether they are lovers, but Leni dodges the question and begins making soup for Dr. Huld. When K. talks with Block, Block says five lawyers have been handling his case, which is still in the courts after five years. K. goes into Huld’s room to fire him, and Block and Leni follow. After K. expresses his displeasure with Huld, the lawyer tells him little progress can be expected in any court case. He tells Block his case is still at the beginning and that a judge believes the outcome will be unfavorable. However, Huld says, he will continue pressing the court on Block’s behalf. ........One day, the president of the bank where K. works asks him to escort an important client–an Italian business executive with an interest in art–through a local cathedral with interesting artworks. K. was chosen because of his knowledge of art and architecture. When K. arrives at the appointed time, the Italian is nowhere to be seen, and the church is empty. While K. waits for the Italian, a priest mounts a pulpit. A sermon? Is there really going to be a sermon when only one person is in the pews? How absurd. K. quickly walks down the central aisle, hoping to reach the exit before the sermon begins. The voice of the priest then reverberates through the church: “Joseph K.!” Surprised, K. turns around. ........“You are being held for trial.” ........“Yes, I’ve been notified,” K. replies. ........“Good. You’re the one I want.” ........The priest, it turns out, is a prison chaplain who arranged for K. to be in the cathedral that morning. He tells K. his trial is going poorly and that he will probably be found guilty in a lower court. When K. says he plans to get further help and seek acquittal, the priest frowns on the idea and lowers his head. The church, meanwhile, has darkened because of a storm. ........“Are you angry?” K. says. ........No reply. ........“It wasn’t my intention to insult you.” ........After a long silence, the priests comes down from the pulpit and talks with K. After K. compliments the priest for his friendly manner, the priest says K. is deceiving himself. In a roundabout way–through a parable–he tells K. that he must accept things as they are; he cannot fight them. What is important is not whether everything the court says is true; what is important is that the court’s action is necessary. ........After six more months pass and K.’s case continues to stagnate, two men wearing top hats arrive at K’s boardinghouse at 9:30 in the evening. ........“You’re here for me?” K. says. ........They nod. ........Outside, they take him by the arms and lead him through the streets. He stops and resists, gluing his feet to the pavement. Ahead he sees Fraülein Bürstner in the shadows–or someone who looks like her. In a moment, he decides it is futile to resist and resumes walking. Eventually, they arrive at a stone quarry outside the city. One of the men strips K. bare to the waist. When he shivers, the man pats him on the back as if to say, “It’ll be all right.” Next, they find a stone block, lay K. down and place his head on it, and take out a butcher knife. In the top story of a building across from the quarry, K. sees a figure leaning out of an open window Who is it? ........One of the men plunges the knife into K.’s heart and twists it. ....  Setting . European city in a country with an oppressive government. The atmosphere is gray and gloomy. Kafka, a Czech who wrote in German, may have had in mind the city of his birth, Prague. (Until 1918, Prague was part of Austria-Hungary, also called the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Late that year, Austria-Hungary dissolved as part of the outcome of the First World War. Austria and Hungary became republics, as did Czechoslovakia–with Prague as its capital. The nation was made up of Czechs, Slovaks, and minority groups that included Germans, Ukrainians, and Hungarians. Czechoslovakia fell under Nazi domination between 1939 and 1945, then under Soviet communist domination until 1989, when Soviet communism collapsed. In 1993 Czechoslovakia was divided into two republics, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Prague is the capital of the former.) . Main Characters . Protagonist: Joseph K. Antagonist: The Government and Court System .. Joseph K. Bank officer accused of an undisclosed crime. Frau Gruber Joseph K.’s landlady. Fraülein Bürstner Tenant in Joseph K.’s boardinghouse. Dr. Huld Joseph K.’s invalid lawyer. Leni Dr. Huld’s nurse. Titorelli Painter who advises Joseph K. on court proceedings. Willem, Franz Arresting officers. Investigator Official who interrogates Joseph K. after his arrest. Bank executives and Employees Court and Police Officials Various citizens . . The Trial is a novel that expresses the frustration, anxiety, and loneliness of a man in an age of big government. Kafka wrote it in German, as he did all of his works. It was published in 1925, a year after Kafka's death. Der Prozess (The Process), the German title of the novel, is apt, for it suggests that justice in Kafka's fictional world (which, of course, reflects justice in the real world) is a continuing process. In Joseph K.'s case, the process does not end until K. dies.. .
. Theme 1 . A force or entity beyond the control and scrutiny of the individual arbitrarily determines his or her destiny, justly or unjustly. 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. Sophocles develops this theme in Oedipus Rex, in which the protagonist, Oedipus–powerless to overturn the verdict of fate–kills his own father and marries his own mother. 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.” Thomas Hardy made this theme central to many of his novels. His characters are dominated by environmental, psychological, or biological determinism. Of course, one of the most famous expositions of this theme is in the Bible in the Book of Job. . Theme 2 . Big government is unwieldy, unfair, and unforgiving. In this respect, 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. If you have ever had to wait in a long line to conduct business with a local, state, or federal government–or if you have ever had to complete government forms with complex and confusing questions–you know how frustrating government can be. . 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
Climax
Although Samsa's sister takes pity on him and feeds him, everyone else rejects him. As an outcast, he has only one future to look forward to: death. Both Gregor Samsa and Joseph K. are innocent victims of an uncaring society. . 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. Often, the depiction is a grotesque distortion or phantasmagoric representation of reality. However, there is logic to this approach for these reasons: (1) Not everybody perceives the world in the same way. What one person may see as beautiful or good another person may see as ugly or bad. Sometimes a writer or his character suffers from a mental debility, such as depression or paranoia, which alters his perception of reality. Expressionism enables the writer to present this altered perception. 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. Shakespeare expressed this view in The Merchant of Venice:
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath! (Antonio to Bassanio, Act I, Scene III, Lines 98-102) . 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. 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 University of 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 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. Politically, he was a socialist; theologically, an atheist. At the end of his life, Kafka was almost completely isolated–from his family, from the God that he did not acknowledge, from a regular job and the companionship of co-workers, from the wife that he never had, from anti-Semitic Germans whose culture he embraced and whose language he wrote in. He did have one close friend, however: 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), "Metamorphosis" (1915), In the Penal Colony (1919), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927). He died on June 3, 1924, at Kierling, Austria. For a more detailed biography of Franz Kafka, click here. Study Questions and Essay Topics
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