The Trial

Below is a short sample of the essay The Trial. If you sign up you could be reading the rest of this essay in under two minutes. Registered users should login to view the essay.

The Trial

THE TRIAL
by Franz Kafka
read by Geoffrey Howard
This disturbing and vastly influential novel has been interpreted on many levels of structure and symbol; but most commentators agree that the book explores the themes of guilt, anxiety, and moral impotency in the face of some ambiguous force.
Joseph K. is an employee in a bank, a man without particular qualities or abilities. He could be anyone, and in some ways he is everyone. His inconsequence makes doubly strange his “arrest” by the officer of the court in the large city where K. lives. He tries in vain to discover how he has aroused the suspicion of the court. His honesty is conventional; his sins, with Elsa the waitress, are conventional; and he has no striking or dangerous ambitions. He can only ask questions, and receives no answers that clarify the strange world of courts and court functionaries in which he is compelled to wander.
The plight of Joseph K., consumed by guilt and condemned for a “crime” he does not understand by a “court” with which he cannot communicate, is a profound and disturbing image of man in the modern world. There are no formal charges, no procedures, and little information to guide the defendant. One of the most unsettling aspects of the novel is the continual juxtaposition of alternative hypotheses, multiple explanations, different interpretations of cause and effect, and the uncertainty it breeds. The whole rational structure of the world is undermined.
Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a lustful woman? -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra
The Trial
Summary:
Chapter 1: The Arrest / Conversation with Frau Grubach / Then Fräulein Bürstner
Joseph K., our hero, wakes up the morning of his thirtieth birthday expecting his breakfast to be brought to him. What he gets instead are two warders, Franz and Willem, telling him he's under arrest. He protests some, demanding to see their boss, at first thinking it must be a joke perpetrated on him by some people at the Bank, where he works as a chief clerk. He meets the Inspector, who says it's for real but refuses to say why. The Inspector is seated in Fräulein Bürstner's room next door, and K. sees three men he knows from the bank there, Rabensteiner, Kaminer, and Kullich, whom he greets angrily before hurrying off to work.
After he gets home from work that evening, he talks with his landlady, Frau Grubach. He apologizes for the ruckus and she says it's all right, but...

The complete article is about 10062 words and 40.25 pages long.

To continue reading the complete article, subscribe below and get free instant unlimited access.

Once you have registered for an Account, No refunds can be issued.
Please make sure you look over the site before you purchase an account!!!