The Trial
by Franz Kafka
Summary
Bank official Josef K. wakes on the morning of his thirtieth birthday to find two agents in his rented room, informing him he is under arrest, though neither they nor anyone else in the novel will ever tell him what he is charged with. Kafka spends the year that follows watching Josef K. try every method a rational man might reach for, a competent lawyer named Huld, an unofficial court painter named Titorelli who claims to know how the system actually works, his own landlady Frau Grubach and a neighboring lodger named Fraulein Burstner, and finding that none of it moves him one inch closer to understanding the charge against him or the court that has brought it. The court itself operates out of attics, back rooms, and unremarkable apartment buildings rather than any recognizable seat of justice, staffed by officials whose authority is never explained and never questioned by anyone but Josef K. himself. On the eve of his thirty first birthday, exactly a year after his arrest, two men in formal dress arrive at his lodgings, walk him without resistance to a small quarry on the edge of the city, and kill him there with a butcher's knife, one man holding him while the other does it. His last words, as Kafka gives them to him, are like a dog, and the men who kill him are never named or explained any more than the charge against him ever was.
Kafka narrates the whole nightmare in a flat, procedural voice that treats each fresh absurdity as simply the next item of business, and that restraint is exactly what makes the dread accumulate; nobody in the novel raises their voice, and the effect is worse for it. It reads briskly chapter to chapter, propelled by Josef K.'s own stubborn faith that reason will eventually work, right up to an ending that offers the reader no such reward.
Kafka left the manuscript as 161 loose pages torn from several notebooks he had worked in side by side, with no key anywhere to the order the chapters belonged in; scholars still argue over exactly how Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executor, chose to arrange them, and no one now can say for certain that the version readers have is the one Kafka intended.
Historical Context & Significance
Kafka won no literary prize in his lifetime and published only a handful of shorter works under his own supervision. Prize money reached him exactly once, and secondhand: Carl Sternheim took the Fontane Prize in 1915 and passed the money on to Kafka, then almost entirely unknown. He asked Max Brod to burn everything unfinished after his death in 1924, and Brod instead edited the torn notebook pages into a publishable novel, which the Berlin firm Verlag Die Schmiede issued on April 26, 1925, a decision that handed the world The Trial against the express wish of the man who wrote it. The novel arrived a year after its author's death, assembled by someone else out of pages he had asked to have burned, which left it outside what any prize of the period was set up to judge.
Willa and Edwin Muir's 1937 English translation carried the book to readers well beyond German speaking Europe for the first time, and its reputation has only grown since; Le Monde named it one of the hundred books of the twentieth century in 1999. Orson Welles adapted it into a 1962 film starring Anthony Perkins, Philip Glass turned it into an opera in 2014, and the word Kafkaesque, born largely from this novel's bureaucratic nightmare, has entered ordinary English to describe exactly the kind of dread the book invented.