........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.
....

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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
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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 just as the surviving members of a family are responsible for a debt or property mortgage inherited from a deceased member.
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Climax
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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. 
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Style and Content
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The novel is written in German in uncomplicated, well-crafted, easy-to-understand sentences designed to depict the feelings evoked in Joseph K. by the world around him, as in expressionism. Sometimes these feelings manifest themselves in irrational, nightmarish images, as in surrealism. The Trial is a dark and depressing novel–and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. In his attempt to solve his problem, the main character, Joseph K., is as hapless as the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote in his attempts to snare the roadrunner. 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 a Kafka short story entitled "The Metamorphosis," the main character, Gregor Samsa, suffers a kind of loneliness similar to, but even more intense than, Joseph K.'s: Samsa awakens one day to discover that he has turned into a huge insect. Following is the opening paragraph of this story:

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.  He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.–(Wylie, David, translator. Project Gutenberg text.)

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. 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: 

A goodly apple rotten at the heart: 
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath! 
(Antonio to Bassanio, Act I, Scene III, Lines 98-102)

Study Questions and Essay Topics

1. Why did Kafka name The Trial's protagonist Joseph K. but give other characters a last name? 
2. In a good dictionary, look up Kafkaesque, a word derived from Kafka's name and the themes of his literary works. Then discuss or write about experiences of yours, including dreams, that you would describe as Kafkaesque. 
3. 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? 
4. If you were in Joseph K's place, what action would you take to exonerate yourself? 
5. 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.
6. Do you believe that it is also possible that the justice system in The Trial symbolizes Kafka's domineering father? If so, write an essay or generate a discussion in which you cite passages from The Trial, as well as incidents from Kafka's life, that support this interpretation. 
7. Are Joseph K.'s encounters with women in The Trial based on author Kafka's encounters with women? Explain your answer. 
8. Does Joseph K. resemble his creator, Franz Kafka? 
9. In what ways does Joseph K.'s ordeal resemble the sometimes frustrating experiences you face when dealing with big government?