The Trial

Summary

The Trial follows Josef K., a respected chief clerk at a large bank in an unnamed city, from the morning of his thirtieth birthday, when two warders appear in his lodgings and tell him he is under arrest, to the eve of his thirty-first, when two men in frock coats lead him to a quarry and kill him. Neither K. nor the reader ever learns what he is accused of or what law he has broken. The arrest is strange from the start. The warders, Franz and Willem, eat his breakfast; the inspector, questioning him in his neighbor Fräulein Bürstner's room, says he may go on working. That night K. waits up for Fräulein Bürstner and kisses her. Summoned to a first hearing on a Sunday, he finds the court in a tenement in a poor suburb, its courtroom crowded with men in dark coats, and delivers a defiant speech, interrupted by a court usher's wife and a student embracing in a corner. Returning to the empty courtroom, he finds that the examining magistrate's law books are indecent picture books and is led through the stifling court offices in the attic, where he nearly faints in the bad air. The trial gradually takes over his life. In a lumber room at the bank he finds the two warders being flogged because he complained of them. His uncle Karl, up from the country, takes him to the lawyer Huld, a sick man who receives clients in bed; Huld's nurse Leni, who has a web of skin between two fingers, draws K. away and becomes his lover. Huld promises much and does nothing. On the advice of a manufacturer, K. visits Titorelli, a painter of judges' portraits who lives in an attic that opens onto yet more court offices. Titorelli explains that no one is ever truly acquitted; a defendant may hope only for apparent acquittal, which can be reversed at any time, or indefinite postponement. K. dismisses Huld after seeing his abject client, the merchant Block. Sent by the bank to show an Italian client the cathedral, K. is called by name from the pulpit by the prison chaplain, who tells him that his case is going badly and relates the parable "Before the Law": a man from the country waits all his life before a door kept by a doorkeeper, and as he dies is told that the door was meant only for him and will now be shut. The two argue over what the story means. In the final chapter K. goes with his executioners without resistance and is stabbed in the heart in a quarry outside the city. Kafka wrote the novel in 1914 and early 1915, left it unfinished, and asked Max Brod to burn his manuscripts. Brod instead arranged the completed chapters and published the book in Berlin in 1925. The library does not include a full text: the German original is in the public domain, but the standard English translations remain under copyright.

Plot or Argument

• Chapter 1: Arrest; Frau Grubach; Fräulein Bürstner

  On his thirtieth birthday Josef K. is arrested in his lodgings by two warders and an inspector who will not name the charge but let him go to work. That night he apologizes to his neighbor Fräulein Bürstner for the use of her room and kisses her.

• Chapters 2–3: The first hearing and the empty courtroom

  K. finds the court in the upper floor of a tenement and makes a speech denouncing the proceedings. A week later he finds the courtroom empty, learns from the usher's wife how the court works, sees the magistrate's indecent books, and is led through the airless attic offices, where he grows faint.

• Chapters 4–5: Fräulein Bürstner's friend; the flogger

  Fräulein Bürstner avoids him and sends her friend Fräulein Montag to speak for her. In a lumber room at the bank K. discovers the warders Franz and Willem being beaten because of his complaint, and fails to stop it.

• Chapter 6: The uncle, the lawyer and Leni

  K.'s uncle takes him to the sick advocate Huld, at whose bedside sits the chief clerk of the court. K. slips away with the nurse Leni, angering his uncle and harming his case.

• Chapter 7: The painter Titorelli

  Huld lectures K. on the court's hierarchy. A manufacturer sends K. to Titorelli, painter to the judges, who explains actual acquittal, apparent acquittal and protraction, and sells him three identical landscape paintings.

• Chapter 8: Block the merchant; dismissing the lawyer

  At Huld's K. meets Block, a merchant whose case has lasted five years and who has become servile to the lawyer. K. dismisses Huld, who humiliates Block in front of him.

• Chapter 9: In the cathedral

  Waiting in vain in the dark cathedral for an Italian client, K. is addressed by the prison chaplain, who tells him the parable of the doorkeeper before the Law and debates its interpretations with him.

• Chapter 10: The end

  On the eve of his thirty-first birthday two men in frock coats take K. through the city to a quarry and kill him with a knife, while a figure leans out of a lit window nearby.

• Unfinished chapters

  Kafka also left incomplete episodes, including a journey to K.'s mother, a visit to the house of the court, a struggle with the deputy director of the bank and a scene with a public prosecutor. Brod printed them in later editions as fragments; scholars still debate the order of the finished chapters.

Characters

• Josef K., protagonist

  Thirty-year-old chief clerk of a bank, confident and ambitious, arrested for an offense that is never named.

• Fräulein Bürstner, neighbor

  Typist who lodges in the same house and whom K. kisses on the night of his arrest.

• Frau Grubach, landlady

  K.'s landlady, who treats the arrest as something learned and above her understanding.

• Franz and Willem, warders

  The two low-ranking officials who arrest K. and are later flogged after he complains of them.

• Uncle Karl, relative

  K.'s uncle from the country, alarmed for the family's good name, who brings him to a lawyer.

• Huld, advocate

  Bedridden lawyer with connections at court, who talks endlessly of petitions and achieves nothing.

• Leni, nurse

  Huld's nurse and housekeeper, with webbed fingers, who is drawn to accused men and becomes K.'s lover.

• Titorelli, court painter

  Painter of judges' portraits who explains the possible outcomes of a trial.

• Block, fellow defendant

  Merchant whose long trial has consumed his business and made him abject before his lawyer.

• The prison chaplain, priest of the court

  Priest who calls K. by name in the cathedral and tells him the parable of the door of the Law.

• The usher's wife, court servant

  Washerwoman in the court tenement who offers to help K. and is carried off by a student.

Lessons

• A law that cannot be seen

  K. is accused under a law no one will show him, by a court whose higher judges no defendant ever meets. Kafka builds the novel's dread not from cruelty alone but from the absence of any reason given, so that every attempt to understand the system draws K. deeper into it.

  • What does the inspector tell K. about the charge on the morning of the arrest?
  • What does K. find in the magistrate's law books in the empty courtroom?
  • Can a person defend himself against an accusation that is never stated?

• The question of guilt

  K. insists from the start that he is innocent, yet he behaves increasingly like a guilty man, neglecting his work and thinking of nothing but the case. The novel leaves open whether the court pursues a real fault, an imagined one, or simply the condition of being human.

  • How does K.'s conduct with Fräulein Bürstner and Leni bear on the question of his guilt?
  • Why does the chaplain tell K. that the court wants nothing from him?
  • Is K. right to claim that no one can be guilty, since all are men?

• Before the Law

  The parable told in the cathedral compresses the novel: a man waits all his life at a door meant only for him, never daring to go through. The chaplain and K. argue over whether the doorkeeper deceived the man or served him, and the novel lets the parable stand without a final reading.

  • What does the man from the country do during his years of waiting?
  • Why does the chaplain refuse to say that the doorkeeper deceived him?
  • What might the door of the Law stand for, and why is it meant for one man only?

• Seeking help in the wrong places

  K. turns in succession to his uncle, a lawyer, a nurse, a manufacturer and a painter, each of whom offers influence rather than truth. Block, the merchant reduced to servility after five years, shows where such help leads.

  • What does Titorelli mean by apparent acquittal and protraction?
  • Why does K. dismiss Huld, and what does he see in Block?
  • Whom could K. have trusted, if anyone?

Context

Kafka wrote The Trial in Prague in the first months of the First World War, while working as a lawyer at a semi-public accident insurance institute and living within the elaborate legal and administrative order of the Habsburg monarchy. His training in law and his daily work with claims, appeals and files gave him an exact knowledge of procedure. The novel's court is not modeled on any real Austrian court; it is a fiction set beside ordinary bank offices and boarding houses.

Composition

Kafka began the novel in August 1914, shortly after the breaking of his first engagement to Felice Bauer at a meeting in a Berlin hotel that he later compared in his diary to a tribunal. He wrote the first and last chapters early and worked on the others until January 1915, then set the manuscript aside unfinished. The parable "Before the Law" was the only part he published, in 1915 and in the collection A Country Doctor (1919). After Kafka's death in 1924 Max Brod, ignoring his friend's instruction to destroy the papers, ordered the completed chapters and published the novel with Die Schmiede in Berlin in 1925.

Reception

The novel became one of the defining books of the twentieth century. Readers have taken it as a religious allegory of guilt and grace, a prophecy of modern bureaucracy and the arrests of later dictatorships, a psychological study, and a Jewish meditation on law and exile; scholars disagree over how far Kafka intended any of these. The English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir appeared in 1937, and later translations by Breon Mitchell (1998) and others follow the critical German edition, which reconsiders Brod's ordering and editing. Orson Welles filmed it in 1962.

Comparisons

• the-metamorphosis

  Both stories begin with a man waking to find his life overturned by something never explained; Gregor's change is bodily and private, Josef K.'s is legal and public.

• bleak-house

  Dickens's Court of Chancery, where the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce consumes lives without end, is an earlier picture of law as an endless maze; Dickens satirizes a real court, while Kafka's court has no real original.

• billy-budd-and-other-stories

  Melville's Bartleby and Billy Budd both face an order of office and law that cannot understand them; Billy's trial, like K.'s, ends in a death that the system treats as necessary.

• crime-and-punishment

  Raskolnikov knows his crime and the reader watches his conscience; Josef K. has no known crime, yet his anxiety and self-defense echo a guilt he cannot name.

• camus-the-stranger

  Meursault and Josef K. are both tried by courts that seem to judge the man rather than the deed; Camus admired Kafka and wrote an essay on his work.

• the-sickness-unto-death

  Kafka read Kierkegaard, whose account of despair and of the single individual before God offers one religious frame for K.'s isolation before the Law.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The opening sentence, in which someone must have slandered Josef K., and the warders who eat his breakfast.
• The court's locations in tenements and attics, always just above ordinary life.
• The ways K. turns to others for help: uncle, lawyer, Leni, manufacturer, painter.
• The parable of the doorkeeper in the cathedral chapter and the argument about its meaning.
• K.'s conduct and thoughts as he walks to the quarry in the last chapter.

Key terms and names

Josef K.

The protagonist, known only by first name and initial, a chief clerk at a bank arrested on his thirtieth birthday.

The court

The unnamed judicial authority that accuses K.; its lower officials are visible, its high judges never seen, and its offices fill the attics of the city.

Apparent acquittal

Titorelli's term for a release that can be overturned at any time, as opposed to a true acquittal, which no one has ever been known to receive.

Protraction

Titorelli's other option: keeping the trial in its earliest stage indefinitely through constant attention to the officials.

Before the Law

The parable told by the chaplain in Chapter 9 of a man from the country who waits all his life outside a door meant only for him.

Max Brod

Kafka's friend and literary executor, who published the unfinished novel in 1925 instead of burning it, choosing the order of its chapters.

Translation used

This library does not include the full text: Kafka's German original is in the public domain, but the English translations (the Muirs' of 1937 and later ones) are under copyright, so students should read the novel in a translation supplied by their teacher.

Content note

Recommended for older high school students with guidance: the novel includes sexual encounters, a flogging, a pervasive mood of dread and an execution by knife.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What happens on the morning of Josef K.'s thirtieth birthday, and what is he allowed to do afterwards?
2. Comprehension Where does K. find the court for his first hearing, and how does his speech there end?
3. Comprehension What three outcomes does Titorelli describe, and why is a real acquittal out of reach?
4. Interpretation Why does Kafka never reveal the charge against K.?
5. Interpretation In the cathedral, is the doorkeeper of the parable a deceiver, a servant, or something else?
6. Interpretation Why does K. offer no resistance in the last chapter?
7. Big Question Is it possible to be guilty without knowing one's offense, and what would justice require in that case?

Faith Connections

• Job 10:2 (Scripture)

  Job asks God not to condemn him but to show him why He contends with him; like K., Job demands to know the charge, though Job addresses a personal God who finally answers him from the whirlwind.

• Matthew 7:7-8 (Scripture)

  Christ promises that to him who knocks the door will be opened; the man from the country in Kafka's parable never knocks or enters, and Christian readers have set the two doors side by side.

• Romans 3:19-24 (Scripture)

  Paul teaches that the law stops every mouth and makes all the world guilty before God, and that justification comes freely by grace; readers have seen K.'s court as a world of law with no grace in view.

• Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Great Conversation)

  Kafka read Kierkegaard during these years and wrote about him in his letters and diaries; Kierkegaard's single individual standing alone before an incomprehensible demand is one religious frame for Josef K.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: If a person is judged by a law he cannot see, through officials who cannot explain it and judges he can never reach, then every effort at self-defense only binds him more closely to the process; Josef K.'s year of struggle shows this, ending in an execution he no longer resists.

Rhetorical device: parable (mise en abyme). In Chapter 9 the chaplain's story of the man before the door of the Law reflects the whole novel in miniature, and the debate that follows models the interpretive arguments the book itself provokes.

Debate: Resolved: that Josef K. is in some sense guilty.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Argue whether The Trial is chiefly about a corrupt system or about the inner life of the accused, using the flogging scene, Titorelli and the cathedral chapter.

Comparison with The Metamorphosis: Compare how Gregor Samsa and Josef K. respond to the unexplained catastrophe that opens each story, and how each story ends.

Medical Lens

The novel is not about illness, but bodily states register K.'s ordeal: he grows faint in the stale air of the court offices and must be helped out, the lawyer Huld conducts business from his sickbed, the warders are flogged, and Leni's webbed fingers mark her as strange. Kafka's tuberculosis was diagnosed in 1917, after the novel was written, so reading the book through his disease is anachronistic. Readings of K.'s mounting preoccupation as anxiety or obsessive guilt are interpretive; Kafka gives no diagnosis and keeps the narration close to K.'s own view.

• Chapter 3 (In the Empty Courtroom; The Offices)

  K. becomes weak and dizzy in the airless attic offices of the court and is half carried to the stairs, recovering in the open air.

  Mind Body
• Chapter 5 (The Flogger)

  In a lumber room at the bank K. finds the warders being whipped by an official in leather, and their cries follow him.

  Pain
• Chapter 6

  The advocate Huld receives K. and his uncle in bed, weakened by a heart complaint, while Leni nurses him.

  Disability Deformity
• Chapter 10

  K.'s execution in the quarry, described with physical exactness.

  Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Explain the competing interpretations of the doorkeeper that the chaplain and K. discuss in the cathedral, and argue which best fits the rest of the novel.

• Fiction

  Write the morning of the arrest from the point of view of Frau Grubach, who watches from the next room and does not understand what is happening.

• Classroom

  Draw a map of the novel's spaces, from K.'s lodgings and the bank to the tenement court, the attic offices, Titorelli's room, the cathedral and the quarry, and note how each is connected to the court.

Further Reading

• The Castle, Franz Kafka

  Kafka's other unfinished novel, in which a land surveyor seeks access to an unreachable authority.

• Franz Kafka: A Biography, Max Brod

  Memoir and biography by the friend who preserved and published The Trial.

• Kafka: The Decisive Years, Reiner Stach

  Covers 1910–1915, including the broken engagement and the writing of the novel.

• Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt, Saul Friedländer

  Short biography attentive to Kafka's religious background and the themes of guilt.