Jesse’s Reviews > The Trial > Status Update

fragments: Journey to His Mother

in this fragment, two weeks before his execution, he decides to visit his ailing mother. Josef doesn’t reach her within the text, but that’s his intent. is Josef’s execution a metaphor for suicide?

fragments: Struggle With the Vice President

this guy didn’t come up much early in the text but as the trial drags on Josef is clearly worried about his professional rivalry with the VP given his struggles to concentrate on his work as his trial (his self-examination of his own character) consumes him. This episode has a bumbling Josef trying to demonstrate his aptitude to a VP who doesn’t care.

fragments: To Elsa

This fragment further unites the idea that the trial is symbolic of Josef’s conception of his own misdeeds. He is going to visit a woman named Elsa, and as he commits to this and flaunts the powers of the court, they become faint to the point of nonexistence and he can proceed on with his life unperturbed by his self-judgment.

fragments: Public Prosecutor

the given text has no friends for K.; he is mostly concerned with the attentions of women. This extract has his sole friendly relationship with a man, Hasterer, who appears to be of a similar if less discerning character than K.

fragments: B’s Friend

we can tell from elsewhere in the text that Josef is a womanizer of some sort but this fragment, where Fraulein Burstner gets a new apartment mate, spells it out so hard that the ambiguity of K.’s character evaporates completely: “he knew that Fraulein Burstner was an ordinary little typist who couldn’t resist him for long.”

the end:

two enormous scenes, the encounter in the cathedral with the “prison chaplain” and Josef’s execution. What prison? when has the court ever hinted at a prison? K.’s existence is the prison. his existence since he has acknowledged his guilt. The proceedings of the court shape themselves into the judgment.

An impossibly dense stretch of story that outlines the truth of the court. If you are arrested by the court, it prefigures a guilty verdict. You can only attempt to forestall the verdict, either through this “apparent acquittal” or protraction, neither of which result in actual acquittal. The lion’s share is Josef’s encounter with Block at his lawyer’s office, and what Block has to say about his experience.

This section is mostly Josef floundering with the specter of the trial upon him. The episode with the lawyer wraps up with K. engaging his services but in the very next segment he is making goo goo eyes at the lawyer’s servant and not thinking about his case. As the reality of this trial sets in he also begins to struggle with his job. As it turns out, one of his business partners knows something of the trial.

The world of the trial is a dark psychodrama. When Josef is in the law offices of the prosecutors, he is smothered and weak, lacking in willpower. When he is at his office, he finds the two guards in a junk closet, getting beaten by a flogger. It’s odd enough that they are at the office in the first place, but when they appear to be in this closet purely for his exhibition, it becomes otherworldly.

Pretty early on my feel of Kafka is that The Trial is born out of the paranoia of feeling disassociated from your fellow human beings. Josef has no knowledge of why he ought to be arrested and maintains his own innocence, understanding that acknowledging or entertaining his potential guilt is the key to guilt settling upon him. The worst thing we see him up to is his Indiscretions in courting Fraulein Burstner.