The Trial

Chapters 8-10 move quickly toward the end of K.’s trial. K.’s decision to dismiss his lawyer—a decision born of his growing frustration with his case—leads him to encounter the merchant Rudi Block, another defendant who becomes, albeit hesitantly, another source of information on the workings of the court. The information Block conveys serves mainly to demonstrate the psychological harm caused by Inaccessible Systems of Power. Block tells K., for example, about the “great lawyers” who are in his understanding just as inaccessible as the “highest court.” But Block’s significance lies chiefly in the fact that he serves as a kind of foil for K., or maybe even as a potential future version of K. Block, whose case is now five years old (K.’s has only been going on for six months), is in a much more advanced state of psychological subjugation than K. is. Formerly a successful merchant, Block is now little more than “the lawyer’s dog” (195). All of his time is occupied by his trial, to the point that he virtually lives at his lawyer’s house: “If you’re trying to work on your trial, you have little time for anything else” (174). But Block is not entirely without dignity, and he is enraged when K. reproaches him for his behavior before Herr Huld. The encounter with Block, if anything, cements K.’s resolve to dismiss his lawyer: Is this what he will become?

K. can hardly function anymore, and his obsession with his case feeds a persecution mania that extends beyond the trial, so that he grows worried about his job at the bank and even fears that his rival, the vice president, is sabotaging him. K. increasingly views the court as hostile and corrupt, though the priest cautions him against this view. The priest’s parable or allegory of the doorkeeper, introduced toward the end of the novel, provides an elusive reflection on K.’s experience with the court. Several different interpretations of the parable are furnished by the priest and disputed by K., most of them hinging on the question of who is the deceiver and who is the deceived (the priest tells the story, after all, to prove to K. that he is deceived about the court). Clearly the parable, which tells of a man’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reach the Law as a doorkeeper bars his path, addresses the theme of Inaccessible Systems of Power. In the end, K. comes to the conclusion that both the doorkeeper and the man are deceived. He recoils, however, from the priest’s final suggestion that the court’s actions need not be rooted in truth so long as they are “necessary” (223). Especially in light of the doorkeeper’s claim that “This entrance was assigned only to you,” the priest’s justification powerfully illustrates The Relationship Between Law and Guilt. If everyone is always already guilty—even from birth, as the law appears to assume—then the court arises out of necessity to address that guilt. At the same time, the court is so pervasive, and its conclusions so inescapable, that it comes to seem like the expression of a natural rather than a socially constructed law. If the court says K. is guilty, some part of his psyche cannot resist believing that it must be so. This is what he means when he protests that the court’s idea of necessity makes “lies […] into a universal system” (223).

The end of the novel also leaves many questions unanswered. There especially seems to be a great gap between the end and the previous chapter, leaving the reader to wonder what actions, if any, K. has taken since his conversation with the priest. The sense of incompleteness is in part a result of the novel’s unfinished state—several chapters, discussed below as “Fragments,” were never completed and were not included in early editions of the novel—but Kafka seems to have made the end of the novel deliberately abrupt. The novel ends exactly where it began, in K.’s room, exactly a year later, creating a kind of ring structure. This ring structure highlights how much K. has changed: At the end, all K.’s resistance is gone, and he goes willingly, almost eagerly, to his death. The only vestige of K.’s resistance—when he stops moving at the deserted square—vanishes as soon as K. sees Fräulein Bürstner or a woman who looks like her, a sight that makes K. realize that “there would be nothing heroic in resistance, in making trouble for these men, in trying to enjoy a final vestige of life by fighting back” (227). Women thus inform K.’s thinking and worldview until the very end: As the priest had warned K. in the cathedral, “You seek too much outside help […] particularly from women” (213). What is left for K. in the final chapter seems to be a feeling of resignation and of shame: K. does not want to die, but he does not have the strength or the will to keep fighting either. This resignation does not make K.’s death any more dignified, however, and as he is killed K.’s last words are “Like a dog!” (231). K., like the other figures involved with the court, has become little different from an animal, “as though the shame was to outlive him” (231).