My Thoughts on “The Trial” by Franz Kafka
“It is often safer to be in chains than to be free”
Franz Kafka
I very much enjoyed this book, but only about a month after reading it. Over time the application to today’s world and theme clicked. I now realize that although it is an unfinished novel, it is truly a work of art.
The novel begins with the main character K being arrested for no apparent reason. He tries to find out what is going on and how he made his way into his situation. He asks everyone he can about what is going to happen. Slowly he begins to discover that many other people are caught up in similar cases with no acquittal or sentencing. As K begins to realize the terrible and confusing position he is in, the curtain is pulled back and the reader realizes the critiques on society Kafka is making.
1. When K first becomes entrapped in his court case, the reader is shown how Kafka views bureaucracy, as singular machine only benefiting the people in control of it; in the case of “The Trial” that would be the judges. Kafka appeals to the humanity of the reader by showing K stuck in this machine. He has fallen through one of the cracks and is now being slowly ground to death by the gears in the heart of it. The judges, or true bureaucrats are portrayed as robotic and not really humans.
2. I believe Kafka was very aware that he put a major irony in the novel. Before K is arrested, all is good, it is peaceful. But then all that utopian euphoria is abruptly shattered by the brutal reality of the world K lives in. But the thing is, K lived in this same world before he was arrested. Yet when he was arrested he was utterly shocked at how this could happen and why it was happening. So how could K be both shocked completely when this happens to him, and live in this world where it is completely normalized. To me I see it as Kafka’s critique of both the government, and the layperson. Kafka critiques the government in the sense that they are withholding information from the people, and in a sense have an opaque bureaucratic system. And also the people where I believe it applies especially today, how many people read the fine print? A law can be established or bill passed, and the only notion we have on its contents is the distorted perspective of any media.
3. In the end of the book K is shot in the back of the head, this is because he has run out of money. He has stopped paying his lawyer, so the system no longer has any need for him. Bureaucracy treated him as a number on a piece of paper. And when those integers ceased on their balance sheets, there was no longer any need for K.
The reason I chose the quote seen at the top of this page is simple. K is in essence a soul seeking freedom. He does all he can to get out of the system but the bureaucracy just chews him up like any old soul. Kafka takes a stance against the revolutionaries, individualists and libertarians of his time. To him, even in a horrid society, life is still worth living.
AI Artwork envisioning the trial
Eternity on Trial 
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