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The Trial – a study guide

plot summary, characters, video, resource materials

Franz Kafka - portrait

The Trial is Kafka’s one indisputably successful novel – a haunting and original study in existential anxiety, paranoia, and persecution. Joseph K is accused one day of being guilty – but not told what crime he has committed. He wrestles hopelessly with legal officials and a nightmare-like court which acts on arbitrary rules, striving to find justice. In the end he fails, only to be killed ‘like a dog’. Kafka gave expression to modern anxiety three decades before most people even started feeling it. This is a novel which stands outside literary norms – a superb achievement of literary modernism. Be prepared for black humour as well as mind-bending contradictions and deeply etched literary expressionism.

Plot summary

Joseph K is a senior bank clerk who lives in lodgings. On his thirtieth birthday he is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents for an unspecified crime. The agents do not name the authority for which they are acting. He is not taken away, however, but left at home to await instructions from the Committee of Affairs.

K goes to visit the magistrate, but instead is forced to have a meeting with an attendant’s wife. Looking at the Magistrate’s books, he discovers a cache of pornography.

He returns home to find Fräulein Montag, a lodger from another room, moving in with Fräulein Bürstner. He suspects that this is to prevent him from pursuing his affair with the latter woman. Yet another lodger, Captain Lanz, appears to be in league with Montag.

Later, in a store room at his own bank, K discovers the two agents who arrested him being whipped by a flogger for asking K. for bribes, as a result of complaints K. previously made about them to the Magistrate. K. tries to argue with the flogger, saying that the men need not be whipped, but the flogger cannot be swayed. The next day he returns to the store room and is shocked to find everything as he had found it the day before, including the Whipper and the two agents.

The Trial K is visited by his uncle, who is a friend of a lawyer. The uncle seems distressed by K’s predicament. At first sympathetic, he becomes concerned K is underestimating the seriousness of the case. The uncle introduces K to an advocate, who is attended by Leni, a nurse, who K’s uncle suspects is the advocate’s mistress. K. has a sexual encounter with Leni, whilst his uncle is talking with the Advocate and the Chief Clerk of the Court, much to his uncle’s anger, and to the detriment of his case.

K visits the advocate and finds him to be a capricious and unhelpful character. He returns to his bank but finds that his colleagues are trying to undermine him.

K is advised by one of his bank clients to visit Titorelli, a court painter, for advice. Titorelli has no official connections, yet seems to have a deep understanding of the process. K learns that, to Titorelli’s knowledge, not a single defendant has ever been acquitted. He sets out what K’s options are, but they all consist merely of delaying tactics to stretch out his case as long as possible before the inevitable ‘Guilty’ verdict.

K decides to take control of his own life and visits his advocate with the intention of dismissing him. At the advocate’s office he meets a downtrodden individual, Block, a client who offers K some insight from a client’s perspective. Block’s case has continued for five years and he appears to have been virtually enslaved by his dependence on the advocate’s meaningless and circular advice. The advocate mocks Block in front of K for his dog-like subservience.

K is asked to tour an Italian client around local places of cultural interest, but the Italian client short of time asks K. to tour him around only the cathedral, setting a time to meet there. When the client doesn’t show up, K explores the cathedral which is empty except for an old woman and a church official. K decides to leave as a priest K notices seems to be preparing to give a sermon from a small second pulpit, lest it begin and K be compelled to stay for its entirety. Instead of giving a sermon, the priest calls out K’s name, although K has never known the priest. The priest works for the court, and tells K a fable, (which has been published separately as ‘Before the Law’) that is meant to explain his situation, but instead causes confusion, and implies that K’s fate is hopeless.

Over the course of the year, the stress of the case weighs on K He begins a gradual decline from confident to a nervous state similar to that of the client Block, and those of other broken defendants he meets in the explosively hot law offices. At the bank, he is humiliated by his inability to handle an important client as he is constantly exhausted from worry.

On the last day of K’s thirtieth year, two men arrive to execute him. He offers little resistance, suggesting that he has realised this as being inevitable for some time. They lead him to a quarry where he is expected to kill himself, but he cannot. The two men then execute him by plunging a knife into his heart.

Study resources

The Trial – Oxford World Classics edition

The Trial – Penguin Modern Classics edition

The Trial – Dover Thrift edition

The Trial – Everyman’s Library Classics edition

The Trial – eBook format at Project Gutenburg

The Trial – Orson Welles’ 1967 film version

The Trial – Cliffs Notes

The Trial – audioBook at Project Gutenberg

The Trial – book review

Franz Kafka – biographical notes

The Trial – as a graphic novel

Kafka’s manuscripts – the absurd legacy

Kafka photomontage – at YouTube

Kafka walks in Prague

Kafka: A Short Introduction – book review

The Trial – 1992 film version by Harold Pinter

Franz Kafka – semi-autobiographical film

Franz Kafka at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Franz Kafka at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Mont Blanc pen - Kafka edition

Mont Blanc – special Franz Kafka edition

Principal characters

Joseph K	a senior bank clerk
Fraulein Burstner	a boarder in the same house as K
Fraulein Montag	a friend of Fraulein Burstner
Frau Grubach	proprietress of the house where K lives
Uncle Karl	K’s uncle and former guardian
Herr Huld	a pompous and pretentious lawyer
Leni	Herr Huld’s seductive nurse
Vice-President	K’s rival at the bank
President	the manager of the bank
Rudi Block	an accused man, former grain-dealer
Titorelli	a court painter

Kafka’s writing

Franz Kafka - manuscript page

a page of Kafka’s manuscript

Franz Kafka: Illustrated Life is a photographic biography that offers an intimate portrait in an attractive format. A lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished. They depict the author’s world – family, friends, and artistic circle – together with original book jackets, letters, and other ephemera. An excellent starting point for beginners which captures fin de siecle Europe beautifully.

Film version

Orson Welles wrote and directed (and acted in) a magnificent film version of The Trial in 1962. t is a faithful dramatisation of the novel which captures perfectly the brooding, nightmarish world of the original. Much of it was filmed in the old French government buildings of the Quai d’Orsay before it was transformed into the present museum.

A young Anthony Perkins gives a superb, haunting performance as the angst-ridden protagonist, Joseph K. The rest of the cast features female icons from the 1960s including Jeanne Moreau, Elsa Martinelli, and Romy Schneider. Welles’ favourite actor Akim Tamiroff is also on hand, and Welles himself plays the Advocate. This is a film which is very faithful to the original novel. It begins with Orson Wells providing voice-over to a comic-book version of the parable ‘Before the Law’.

Cast of characters

Anthony Perkins	Joseph K
Jeanne Moreau	Fraulein Burstner
Romy Schneider	Leni
Elsa Martinelli	Hilda
Orson Welles	The Advocate
Akim Tamiroff	Bloch
Madeleine Robinson	Frau Grubach

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Photomontage

Kafka, family photos, and old Prague

Other works by Franz Kafka

Metamorphosis is often the title story in most collections of the short stories. It is truly one of Kafka’s masterpieces – a stunning parable which lends itself to psychological, sociological, or existential interpretations. It’s the tale of a man who wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a giant insect. His family are horrified, gradually disown him, and he dies with a rotting apple lodged in his side. This collection also includes K’s other masterly uses of the short story form – ‘The Great Wall of China’, ‘The Burrow’, ‘Investigations of a Dog’, and the story which predicted the horrors of the concentration camps – ‘In the Penal Colony’. All of these are now regarded as modern classics of the short story – even though some of them have very little ‘story’ in the conventional sense.

The Castle is Kafka’s last work – a long, rambling, and unfinished novel in which the castle itself which operates as a huge metaphor for authority and bureaucracy. If The Trial is about a hopeless search for justice, The Castle is often said to be about the search for grace and forgiveness. It lies like a magnificent ruin amongst the many other fragments in Kafka’s oeuvre. This is strictly for the advanced devotee. Tackle this one only when you have read the other shorter works.

Amerika is Kafka’s first attempt at a novel. He is renowned for documenting the horrors of modern life, but Kafka also had a lighter and amusing side. This is incomplete, like so much else he wrote. It’s the story of Karl Rossmann who after an embarrassing sexual misadventure is expelled from his European home and goes to live in an imaginary United States (which of course Kafka had never visited). The story is deeply symbolic – as usual – and an interesting supplement to the central texts. The first chapter is frequently anthologised as ‘The Stoker’.

The Complete Short Stories is an amazing bargain, because this includes not only the stories, but also Kafka’s fragments, parables, and sketches. Many of these – although sometimes no more than jottings – contain the germs of ideas and images which Kafka worked up later into his major works. Kafka wrote on the boundaries between fiction and philosophy, and very often he blurrs the distinction between the two.

The Diaries Kafka wrote to himself almost as much as he did to other people, and he communicated some of his most subtle and revealing ideas in fragments and notes made in the margins of his tormented life. Here there are the wrestlings with guilt and personal inadequacy, plus the aspirations to a a higher spiritual life. They cover the period from 1910 to 1923 and reveal the inner world in which he lived. He also describes the father he worshipped and the woman he loved but could not bring himself to marry. It is sometimes difficult to see where his fiction ends and his biographical notes begin, but they form an interesting contrast if they are read in conjunction with the letters and the notebooks. They also need to be read with care, because they conceal almost as much as they reveal.

Letters to Felice Many of Kafka’s surviving letters were written to women with whom he was ‘in love’. The qualification of this term is necessary because they reveal a fascinating ambiguity in his attitude to the recipients. Thousands of words are spent analysing his feelings, arranging meetings then cancelling them, deciding to get married and making all the necessary arrangements for where and how to live – and then changing his mind. Other letters reveal his painstaking sympathy and scrupulous kindness to friends, his neurotic fastidiousness over what most people would regard as trivialities, and his amazing modesty in dealing with other figures of the literary world.

The Complete Novels is a handy, good value compilation which includes Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle. One Amazon reviewer complains that the print is very small, but you can hardly complain when three major works are rolled into one volume for less than the price of two cocktails.

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