The Trial by Franz Kafka

First published:Der Prozess, 1925 (English translation, 1937)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Symbolic realism

Time of plot: Early twentieth century

Locale: Germany

Principal characters

• Joseph K., a bank employee
• Frau Grubach, his landlady
• Fräulein Bürstner, his neighbor
• Albert K., his uncle
• Huld, his lawyer
• Leni, Huld’s servant and mistress
• Titorelli, a painter
• The Inspector, ,
• The Judge, ,
• Franz, and
• Willem, minor officers of the court
• The Washerwoman, befriends K.

The Story

Perhaps someone has been slandering Joseph K., because one morning, without having done anything wrong, he is arrested. Each morning around eight o’clock the landlady’s cook usually brings K., as he is called, his breakfast, and the old woman who lives across the way from him usually stares at him with a curiosity unusual even for her.

This morning, the old woman fails to stare at him, so K. begins to ring her but first hears a knock on his door. Without waiting for a response, a man dressed like a traveler and whom K. does not recognize enters the room. When K. hears a short burst of laughter from another room, he jumps out of bed to investigate. The stranger asks Josef if he would not rather stay in his room, but K. answers that he has no wish to stay in the room nor to be addressed by the stranger, whose name turns out to be Franz. In the next room, K. sees another strange man, whose name is Willem, sitting in front of a window and reading a book. When K. asks to see Frau Grubach, his landlady, Willem puts down his book and informs K. that he is being detained.

Bewildered, K. asks many questions of Franz and his companion, only to find that they can tell him very little about his case. They cannot tell him the reason why he is being held, for they themselves do not know the reason. K. shows these strangers, now his guards, his identification papers. They tell him that they cannot settle his case and that they have been sent to guard him. They also tell K. that they share a similar situation with him because neither of the three knows the intricacies of the law.

The guards think of K. as a reasonable man, and K. is mystified that they are by turn kind to him, yet demanding as well. In a moment of levity, the pair tells K. that he should give them his underwear to hold for him while he undergoes this trial period, and that they will return the underwear to him when he is released. Finally, the inspector arrives; Franz and Willem tell K. that he must wear a black coat before he faces the inspector. K. complies, and then walks into the adjoining room to face his first interrogator.

To his dismay, K. discovers that the inspector is sitting in Fräulein Bürstner’s room. Although he seldom speaks to Bürstner because her job as a typist requires that she leave early and return late, K. is protective of her space and offended that the inspector and the other men are using her space as their own. When the inspector asks K. if he is surprised by the morning’s events, K. replies that he is surprised but not greatly surprised. The inspector gives no further hint as to the reason for the arrest, and he cannot tell K. whether or not K. has been accused of anything. He advises K. to think more about himself and not about the guards or the inspector, and advises K. not to make such a fuss about his innocence. When K. attempts to reconcile simply with a handshake, the inspector shrugs it off and declares how simple everything seems to K.

The inspector tells K. that he can go to work at the bank as usual, but only if accompanied by K.’s three colleagues, who have been in the interrogation room all along. During the day, several visitors stop by K.’s office with deferential birthday greetings, for it is his thirtieth birthday. Rather than following his usual pattern of arriving at his room around 11 p.m.—after drinks with friends or sometimes a visit to a prostitute—he goes home by 9:30 to talk with Fräulein Bürstner. First, however, K. talks to his landlady and asks her if she knows anything about his situation or about the men in his room earlier in the day. She tells him that she knows he is under arrest, but she knows little more. He then waits for Bürstner to arrive home so that he can apologize to her for the disruption of the proceedings. She finally arrives, and K. tells her his story; she listens with feigned interest only. She has trouble believing that K. has come to her room only to tell her this incredible story. Weary of his presence, she asks K. to leave, but before he does, he seizes her wrist and then kisses her passionately before returning to his room.

A few days later, K. receives a telephone call ordering him to appear before the court for interrogation on Sunday. The authorities tell K. that his hearings will be on Sundays so they do not disrupt his professional life. The hearings take place in a building on a street in a distant district with which K. is unfamiliar. Although the phone call notes the day of the meeting, it does not state a specific time. Recognizing that most such meetings occur at 9 a.m., K. decides to arrive by that time.

K. discovers indistinguishable gray apartment buildings set against industrial buildings; the building to which he proceeds has the look of a warehouse, but it is filled with apartments and activity. Because he does not know the exact room to which he must go, he inquires on several floors before he finally locates the room on the fifth floor; it is filled with old men, most of them with long beards.

The judge asks K. if he is a house painter; K. snappishly replies that he is the junior manager of a bank. The judge then tells K. that K. is one hour and ten minutes late. To this charge, K. replies that he is present now, his appearance in court being the main thing. The crowd applauds. Encouraged, he launches into a harangue damning the court, its methods, the warders who had arrested him, and the meeting time and place. The judge seems taken aback, and the crowd seems to be enjoying this spectacle, often siding with K. The proceedings are then interrupted. At the back of the room, a man, who is a law student, grabs and holds the washerwoman in his arms and then screams, all the while looking at the ceiling. K. dashes from the room, loudly refusing to have any more dealings with the court.

All during the week, K. awaits another summons. When none arrives, he decides to revisit the meeting hall. The washerwoman again meets him kindly and expresses her disappointment that the court was not in session. Because her husband is a court usher, she knows a little bit about the court and its methods. The judge, she tells K., can request at any time that she and her husband move the furniture from their flat so that the court can meet in the rooms. The court is only a lower body that rarely interferes with the freedom of the individuals under investigation. If the court acquits the individual, it means little, for a higher court might arrest the individual again. She shows K. the courtroom and the books on the magistrate’s table. K. discovers that the books are dusty and appear never to have been opened; the books, also, are pornographic books, not law books. The woman offers to help K. with his case because she knows that the magistrate likes her. As she and K. are speaking, the law student bursts into the room, seizes her, and carries her up the stairs because the magistrate has called for her.

The woman’s husband kindly offers to lead K. up to the law offices, the inner sanctum of the court, located in the attic. Here, K. finds a number of people waiting for answers to petitions. Some of them have been waiting for years, and they are becoming a little anxious about their cases. The hot room under the roof makes K. dizzy, so he sits down. A young woman tries to soothe him, and the information officer applauds K.’s dogged interest in his own case, indicating that many others do not pursue their cases with such care and interest. Suffering from claustrophobia, K. follows the officer’s advice and leaves the office for the fresh air of the stairway and the streets and finds himself with renewed energy.

A few evenings later, as K. is walking down a corridor in his office, he hears groans coming from behind a door. Mystified, he opens the door to what he thinks is a utility closet and sees a man with a whip flogging Franz and Willem, the two guards who had originally confronted K. in his own flat. They tell K. they are being punished because of K.’s demand that the court punish the guards. K. replies that he has never reported them, nor does he desire to do so. Haunted by this scene, K. asks his assistants to clean out the closet the next day.

K. and his uncle, Albert K., visit a lawyer named Huld, an old friend of Albert, to whom K. might be able to turn for advice and even defense. While in Huld’s office, K. meets Leni, his servant girl whose hand is disfigured by a web between two fingers. She seduces K. with promises that she can help him. All the while, Albert is waiting for him in the car, and upon K.’s return, warns him that his behavior with Leni, who is the lawyer’s mistress as well, may have lost K. the case. However, this warning does not stop K. from continuing to employ Huld for a time, realizing that the lawyer understands the labyrinthine nature of the court and its processes. K.’s case does not move very far under Huld’s direction, so K. decides that he must handle his own case. He fires Huld.

Titorelli, the court painter, advises K., whom he just met, that he can hope for little with this court. He tells K. that he could receive an actual acquittal, an apparent acquittal, or protraction. No one is ever really acquitted, he says, but sometimes cases can be prolonged indefinitely. In return for Titorelli’s advice, K. buys three of his paintings.

Visiting a cathedral, K. is preparing to sit in one of the pews when he hears a priest loudly call his name; the priest then introduces himself as the prison chaplain. K. asks the priest how he is deceiving himself about the nature of the court, and the priest responds by telling K. a parable about a man before the law. This man from the country arrives at the gate to the law, asking to enter; the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant the man admittance just now. The man asks if he can be admitted later, and the doorkeeper replies that it might be possible. The man from the country sits for years waiting to be admitted to the law, entreating the doorkeeper and even the fleas on the doorkeeper’s coat to be admitted. Finally, as he is dying, the man asks the doorkeeper why no one else has come over the years to ask about admittance to the law. The doorkeeper replies simply that this entrance to the law is meant solely for the man from the country and for no one else, and he shuts the door. K. and the priest then engage in a long discussion about the nature of the law, and K. leaves the cathedral with little hope about his case.

It is the evening before K.’s thirty-first birthday, and two men in frock coats and top hats arrive at his apartment. K. is sitting in his room in a black coat. He puts on his gloves, seemingly expecting the men. They all leave K.’s building and proceed to an isolated spot in a nearby quarry, where one of the men holds K.’s throat and the other stabs him in the heart. K. dies like a dog.

Bibliography

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