Kafka - The Trial (Summary)

"The Trial" by Kafka like lot of his works was never completed. Though there is a chapter at the end that brings the story to a conclusion but one does get a feeling if it was the way it was originally intended by the author. Like lot of Kafka's works, this also can be interpreted in many different ways.

The novel starts with protagonist Joseph K.waking up and finding two persons near his bed who inform him that he is being arrested for crimes that are no specified. The real authority of the ones arresting him is also left unknown. He is told that though he is 'arrested', he is free to continue with his normal life as before. K. is a senior bank official finds this kind of arrest strange. He goes on with his daily life. One day he is summoned to attend a court on coming Sunday. K. reaches the place where the court is in progress. The court is disordered, crowded and unregulated. There is a sense of sham in its proceedings. K. makes a speech deriding the whole system yet he is unsure if he made an impact or if anybody cared. K. visits the place next week but the court is not in session and he meets the court attendant who takes him to law offices located in attics.Again the whole legal system comes out as dark, unknown and impenetrable. Till now nothing is divulged of the crime or the authority that bought the charges against K. An uncle of K. takes him to a advocate as he thinks K. is not serious about his case. The advocate discloses the internal workings and the extent of the Law. Since the charges are unknown, he proposes that their defense would involve considerable work. The advocate discloses that the working of court are hidden, the charges, the judges, and laws, the rules, the previous judgments everything is a secret. The advocate tells that the major task of defense is to work with court officials in the background to get a favorable judgement. They start working on the first plea.

K. work at the bank deteriorates as the case disturbs him mentally. One day, a client of the bank tells K. that he is aware of the case and refers him to a painter who may help him. K goes to the painter who is the official painter of the court painting portraits of the judges. He divulges more details about the courts. He tells that absolute acquittal is impossible The only options is either make the case go very slowly by influencing officials or get the case stuck in bureaucratic maze. K. is convinced that the advocate is not working hard on his the case for he has still not completed his plea. He visits him with a plan to dismiss him. There he meets another of advocate's client Block, whose case is going on for five years. There he sees Block's excessively submissive behavior towards the advocate.The scene breaks. In the next, K. waits for a bank's client to show him around a cathedral. The client is late, and instead the cathedral priest starts talking to K. He tells a fable about Law to K. and they both discuss its various interpretations. In the last chapter two men arrive at K. room. They lead him to a abandoned quarry and over him as he lay on the dirt, pass the long knife back and forth between them (to provoke him to commit suicide). At last one holds his shoulder and the other stabs him in the heart.

The inaccessibility of the justice, the over-bearing bureaucracy, the dark and airless corridors of law, the omni-presence of all things legal is the repeating theme in the chapters. The tragic situation of K. where he condemned for a "crime" that he does not know, by a "court" that he can not not reach. In midst of all this, there is the meek human existence trying to penetrate the Law, working hopelessly to curry some favors with officials and trying all possibilities only to be dashed in the next layer of this vast unforgiving organization. The unreachable Law feeds on hope and laying waste the human spirit. The only working principle being that all accused are always guilty and complete acquittal is impossible. In this world, all the parts work giving hope from one hand and extinguishing it from the other in sole purpose to break the human will and make him accept not the invincibility of the Law's power but of individual's hopelessness. The absolute power makes people not question as to why they are arrested or what their crime is, but just trying to work with the Law and its officials to get some reprieve. There is no heroism, no valiant defense in courts and definitely no redemption. Instead there is a bleak existence, the helplessness, the anxiety, the unknown guilt, the final realization, the absurdity of the whole premise, and of the life itself. Like a web, the more one struggles the more he will get stuck in its web.

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