The Trial

Kafka is one of the founding fathers of modernism and is rightly so because he was one of the first to establish that our faith in the world is actually a myth. Modernism was the answer to Realism which had absolute faith in the world and its existence. Kafka’s incomprehensibility of the external world and the attempt to describe at least half the reality of this world failed because no words could describe this reality well enough which led to his total lack of faith in the power of language itself.

Kafka led a lonely life as he was continually working with his craft to quench his thirst and angst for knowledge. This is the first resemblance we see between Kafka and Joseph K. K’s loneliness is reflected in the fact that when he gets arrested there is no one he can expect help from. He is left to his own devices when one fine ordinary morning he realizes that he is under arrested. “Somebody must have made a false accusation against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong”. This is how the novel begins. The reader along with the protagonist is thrown into uncertainty from the very first sentence of the novel. This is the first glimpse we get about the essence of the novel and modernism. Modernism entails the complete disruption of time, reason and habit. This is exactly what we find here. K’s daily routine and privacy is disrupted by an external body of law which is bent on punishing K for a crime he’s not aware of having committed.

K’s question here is that when there is a set body of law governing and ensuring that everything is in order how can some other body of law come and disrupt his everyday life and make him a prisoner without walls. If indeed he is arrested he wonders why he is not put into jail but allowed to walk free but under supervision. He is at a loss about the nature of the crime that he has committed for which he has been subjected to such a punishment. The bewilderment that this disruption causes makes him aggressive and violent because this disruption has entered his sense of the ‘I’ by which his identity is endangered.

He confides in Fraulein Burstner who is another tenant in his apartment because somehow he thinks her privacy too was disrupted as her room was used for the trial by the supervisor. There is also an implication that he might have had some feelings for her since he got angry with Frau Grubach when she said things that questioned Burstner’s virtue. Also, towards the end of their discussion K, on a sudden impulse kisses Burstner. K very well knows that there is no way she can help him out but so meaningless is his understanding of the situation that he’s willing to go to any lengths to find a solution. Before this he even talks to Frau Grubach whose reply is very indicative of the core issue here. She said “you are indeed under arrest, but not like a thief is under arrest - it seems to me something scholarly, forgive me if I am saying something stupid, it seems to me like something scholarly which I don't understand, but which one doesn't have to understand either.” This simple statement from one of the most insignificant characters in the novel holds a lot of relevance. The other body of law is his mind and he is trying to make sense of this world but because K is not able to do so he feels like a prisoner caught in the labyrinthine maze of meaninglessness. This other body of law is a metaphor to this labyrinth fictionalized in the form of a novel. It is because K is an intellectual which not many people are, that he is grappling with his own questions about the meaning of life. Had he not been an intellectual he could have led a very normal life like the others. Being an intellectual is like opening Pandora’s Box. It may not contain evil things but its contents are capable of causing the same effect to mankind by making them lose sense of themselves and the external world. On deep introspection one might be led to believe that since K is a reflection on Kafka, Kafka is trying to put himself in the category of intellectuals thereby possibly explaining why he is so disturbed in his real life.

At the trial in the courtroom Ka and the magistrate simply do not connect with each other which shows that communication is an impossibility. The audience on his left and right represent the Left and the Right. He initially believed that the people in the courtroom were like him who had come seeking justice only to later realize that this feeling of belonging to a group is a disillusion and does not operate anymore.

Kafka has adopted a naturalistic style of writing owing to which there’s detailed accounting of every physical and emotional gesture on both descriptive and symbolic levels. But he doesn’t write about anything about the place he lives in, the kind of world he belongs to, even the name of the place he lives in is not mentioned. The style is underplayed but this doesn’t let the reader escape the immensity of the situation.

This obsession with the mindscape leads to two kinds of emotions typical of Kafka:-

· Utter loneliness

That is not being able to make any sense of the world and the helplessness that arises out of being left to one’s own choices and devices.

· Sense of meaningless

This arises out of being thrown into the world without values or any means of communicating, living with the feeling of being caught in one’s own mind without being able to escape.

We can see that he’s so enticed with the workings of the mind that he’s not bothered about the society or driven by any sort of motivation to change the system. Through every character he comes across he’s trying to grasp the system but meets complete failure. Through this we understand that the Modernist doesn’t ignore convention. They are obsessed with it in order to find meaningless in it.

In this novel there is a reflection of the fearful bureaucracy that was beginning to be a part of the world (Kafka belonged to the pre-Hitler period). The only person who came close to understanding this bureaucracy is Tittorelli, the painter who knows that K would not be able to handle it and therefore tries to steer him away from its complexities.

The end shows us that once we’re sucked into this labyrinth it is impossible for us to find a way out. It is like a black hole and we only get sucked deeper and deeper into it. This is symbolized through the death of K in the end.