The Trial

Franz Kafka’s The Trial explores how the machinery of the legal system is related to and takes advantage of the human experience of guilt. Through the protagonist, Josef K., Kafka presents a nightmarish depiction of the dehumanizing nature of bureaucracy and the psychological burden of guilt in a world governed by opaque laws and inaccessible authorities. In the novel, the law (capitalized in many editions, becoming the “Law”) is an omnipotent and impersonal force that shapes the lives of those subject to it in ways that often have little to do with truth or justice—as the priest tells K. in Chapter 9, one must accept the Law and its agents as grounded in necessity rather than truth. That a priest functions both as an agent of the court and as one of K.’s closest confidants is revealing, as the law in this novel bears striking similarities to Christian theology. From the beginning of the story, K. finds himself arrested and accused of a crime that is never revealed to him (or the reader). K. knows only that he is innocent. Yet K.’s innocence makes no difference at all. The court seems to operate, like the Church, on the assumption of a universal guilt, as evidenced by Titorelli’s