The trial is Kafka’s one of best works, it tells the story of a man named Josef K of age 30 and is a senior bank clerk who is arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of this crime relevant neither to his nor to the reader.
The story follows K over the year after he is arrested as he struggles against the law and the court to resolve the charges made against him. He expresses his innocence throughout the whole time, but ultimately, the burden on K is too much and the result of his inability to resolve the charge is self-destruction.
With this event in his life, his social life was being torn apart. He was losing his social interaction with his neighbors and fellow people, losing clients in his office, was becoming more and more frustrated with his life.
Kafka is a master of creating such scenarios when someone is underwater and can’t able to escape it. K’s attempt to prove his innocence is that type of scenario. The people from whom he is seeking help, are always just a touch too stubborn or come at the problem from just the wrong perspective. Those people, in this way, can not fully understand how futile their efforts are. But as a reader, we can look down on them and see their futility. Our life may be as futile as K’s.
Kafka had woven this fable in such a way that it pointed fingers towards our daily life miseries. It shows the reader, even though K can see the futility of sitting before the doorkeeper of the law, he does not recognize his existential futility.
"Even if K did recognize the futility, though, and even if we recognize the futility of the menial tasks we engage in every day, would we act any differently?"[1]
All we can do is being aware of our surroundings, making some good decisions along the path of our life against our instinct, biases, and heuristics. In this way, we can exist without being consumed by our inevitable fate.
Like Kafka's other novels, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter that appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending. After Kafka died in 1924 his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die. [2]
The writer manages, so, to hold the world that tells making it anguishing and mysterious to give us hours of pleasant and exciting entertainment and for this, I recommend it to everyone reading.
Thank you so much for reading this piece of writing. If you have already read this book, please let me know you thought in the comment section.
ref :
[1] : https://brandonmonk.medium.com/book-review-the-trial-by-franz-kafka-ed3da76186ab
[2] : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial