The Trial
A man is charged and never told with what. Guilt as something already in place before any act of his own.
Someone must have been telling tales about Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.
Josef K., a bank official, is arrested on the morning of his thirtieth birthday by warders who occupy his lodgings and then leave him free to carry on. He keeps his post, consults a bedridden advocate and a court painter, and is led into offices tucked into attics and tenement stairwells. A prison chaplain tells him a parable of a man who waits his whole life at a door meant only for him. The machinery is always in session and never in plain view.
The book shows a man organising his life around an accusation he cannot read, so that the search for the charge becomes its own occupation and, in time, a confession. Kafka renders an authority with no centre and no face that reaches into bedrooms and back rooms, where compliance and shame arrive ahead of any verdict. For the consulting room it offers a study of how a person supplies the content a punishing law withholds, and how conviction settles on someone who has been told nothing.
About the author
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka (1883 to 1924) was a German-language writer who lived and worked in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary. His fiction, including The Trial and The Metamorphosis, follows ordinary people caught before an impersonal authority they cannot reach or understand, often weighed down by guilt. Trained in law and employed at an insurance office, he wrote at night. Most of his work appeared only after his death, published by his friend Max Brod against Kafka's own instructions.
Details
- 1925
- German
- 240
- 9780199238293