This feeling, of course, is based in the last instance on the fact that no man is free from guilt. That all-pervasive guilt becomes the means to secure K.’s participation in a corrupt legal system. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, for instance, wrote in her well-known essay on Kafka: “In spite of the confirmation of more recent times that Kafka’s nightmare of a world was a real possibility whose actuality surpassed even the atrocities he describes, we still experience in reading his novels and stories a very definite feeling of unreality.” For Arendt, this impression of unreality derives from K.’s internalization of a vague feeling of guilt. Many commentators on The Trial have observed a sense of unreality in the novel, a feeling that something is somehow “off” that hangs like a fog over Kafka’s plotline. In fact, Kafka hints at the narrator’s ignorance at the very beginning: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” Why the conjecture about what “must have” happened unless the narrator, who relates the story in the past tense, doesn’t know? That ignorance sets up the humor: During certain particularly insane moments in K.’s journey, the frustration of not knowing why he’s enduring it all becomes unbearable, at which point there’s no choice but to laugh. But with every sentence the reader takes in, it feels increasingly likely that the reason for K.’s arrest will remain a mystery.Īs The Trial follows its tragic path deeper into K.’s insular, menacing, and sexualized world, it gradually becomes clear that the answer was never forthcoming. By withholding knowledge from the protagonist and the reader, Kafka dangles the promise that all will be revealed in the end. As the novelist David Foster Wallace noted in his essay “ Laughing with Kafka,” this is Kafka’s whole schtick, and it’s what makes him so funny. Kafka’s restrained prose-the secret ingredient that makes this story about a bank clerk navigating bureaucracy into an electrifying page-turner-trades on a kind of dramatic irony. As Kafka puts it in the second-to-last chapter, “The Cathedral:” “the proceedings gradually merge into the judgment.” Eventually his accusers decide he must be guilty, and he is summarily executed. navigates a labyrinthine network of bureaucratic traps-a dark parody of the legal system-he keeps doing things that make him look guilty.

is arrested, but can’t seem to find out what he’s accused of. In Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, first published in 1925, a year after its author’s death, Josef K.

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