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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• Chapter 6

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

• Chapter 10

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