The Kafkaesque Absurdity

The Trial (1925)

Franz Kafka (1883–1924)

In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.

Absurdist features of this work :

Chapter — 1

• Josef K., the protagonist, does not know his crime despite being house arrested. The officers will be paid to keep an eye on him for around 10 hours.
• The officers allow him to go to the bank and continue working, insisting that his ordinary life should not be disturbed by the arrest.
• K.’s encounter with Fräulein Bürstner is strange: despite having no romantic relationship with her, he kisses her wildly, and she does not react.
• The three bank officials who were present during the arrest later appear at the bank with K. and behave ordinarily, simply working rather than monitoring him.
• Mrs. Grubach, K’s landlady, initially seemed ashamed and guilty regarding K.’s situation, turns out not to have anything to feel guilty about.

Chapter — 2

• The trial proceedings are held on Sundays so that K.’s professional life at the bank will not be disturbed.
• The address given to K. for his trial does not resemble his expectations, to find a huge, recognisable building, but instead enters an ordinary, poor residential area.
• The area contains grey, unfinished or under-construction buildings.
• When K. finally finds a large building, it turns out to be primarily an ordinary accommodation building, with families living throughout it.
• K. has to search through several floors, climbing from the first to the fifth floor, because there is no clear indication of where his trial is being held. On the fifth floor, K. knocks on a door and suddenly discovers a large crowd gathered inside.
• K. slowly approaches what appears to be the judge’s podium, without having any clear idea of what is happening.
  The judge tells K. that he was supposed to arrive one hour and five minutes earlier, even though the proceedings themselves seem strangely informal.
• When K. says, essentially, “I am here now,” the crowd on the left applauds him, which seems completely inappropriate for a courtroom.
• When K. is asked to approach the podium, someone suddenly jumps up to create space for him, because the crowd is packed so tightly.
• The crowd presses against K. so intensely that he has to push back to prevent them from forcing the judge’s table and chair down.
• The judge is writing the proceedings in a tiny, old, schoolchild-like notebook, which is itself in poor condition.
• Instead of knowing every small detail about Josef’s actual profession, the judge declares that he is a painter.
• When K. says that he is actually a high-ranking bank clerk, the people on the right suddenly burst into such uncontrollable laughter that some are practically losing their balance and sitting on their knees. The situation becomes so absurd that even K. starts laughing at them.
• After K. challenges the judge over this imposed identity, both sides of the crowd suddenly become completely silent.
• K. picks up the judge’s notebook and the book is so badly maintained that he lifts a page with two fingers and nearly cause the whole book to fall apart.
• K. openly questions the judge’s authority by pointing out that someone who keeps judicial records in such a deteriorated book calls himself a judge. The judge takes the book back as though he has been humiliated.
• While K. continues speaking, the judge secretly signals someone in the crowd instead of exercising his authority openly.
• K. discovers that the apparently the judge and divided crowd actually belong to the same organisation, because its members all wear the same large badge, revealing that he belongs to the very organisation K. has been criticising.
• After K. openly condemns the organisation and its practices, he simply begins to leave the trial room. The judge tells K. that he has forfeited his chances of receiving favourable treatment. K. mocks the judge and rejects his offer of favour and leaves.

Chapter — 3

• K. waits to be summoned for another court session, but no summons arrives. He assumes that perhaps he is simply expected to appear every Sunday without being formally summoned.
• K. wants to examine the books kept on the judge’s podium.
• The books on the judge’s podium are filthy, dusty, and badly maintained, and one of them is merely a novel titled What Grete Suffered from her Husband, Hans.
• The woman who appears to be a victim of the court’s system simultaneously seeks K.’s help and offers to help him.
• A law student exercises sexual control over the woman, while even her husband, the judge’s usher, is unable to protect her because he is dependent upon the same judicial system : "There’s no-one I know who’d hold it against me," said the woman. "Him, who put his arms around me, he’s been chasing after me for a long time…..I’ve got no protection from him, even my husband has had to get used to it; if he wants to keep his job he’s got to put up with it as that man’s a student and he’ll almost certainly be very powerful later on."
• The examining judge himself behaves similarly towards the woman.
• The woman admits that she entered the courtroom during K.’s previous hearing simply because she found his eyes attractive.
• K. now plans to have this woman for himself, wounding the pride of the judge and showing himself as not powerless.
• The law student simply lifts the woman onto his shoulder and carries her away, rather than treating the situation as an ordinary interpersonal dispute.
• K. initially believes that no court offices could possibly exist in the attic, only to discover that the court’s offices actually are there.
• The court offices exist inside a poor residential building, where ordinary people live, sleep, and conduct their daily lives. The court appears ashamed to summon accused people openly to these miserable offices, which may explain why the initial proceedings are imposed upon them in their own homes.
• The judge’s usher dreams of violently beating the law student, yet remains powerless to do anything : “What they do is they send me off not too far away so that I can still hope to get back on time if I really hurry.”
• The usher, like his wife, believes that K. can somehow save them, although K. himself cannot understand why his rebellious nature should make him capable of rescuing them.
• The supposed court officials are sitting in a long corridor, looking more like ordinary, tired occupants of a building than powerful judicial officials.
• K. initially mistakes these men for court officials, only to discover that they are actually accused persons waiting there.
• When K. asks one accused man what he is waiting for, the man becomes so startled that he seems to forget how to speak and can barely formulate his answer.
• K. himself becomes physically drowsy and unable to breathe inside the court building.
• A young woman immediately recognises K.’s physical distress and tries to arrange for him to be taken to the sick room, even though K. refuses.
• The court officials themselves contribute money to provide the information-giver with his fine clothes, because his appearance is considered important for creating a good impression upon litigants.
• When K. finally leaves, he feels almost immediately rejuvenated, whereas the young woman who has lived inside the building becomes unable to breathe in the fresh outside atmosphere.
• The people connected with the court seem to live, sleep, work, and remain trapped within the same oppressive building.

Chapter — 4

No particular absurd feature was observed in this chapter.

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K. wants to meet Miss Bürstner to explain and apologise for his previous behaviour and to assure her that he intends to remain within proper boundaries. Miss Bürstner repeatedly avoids meeting K. However, on one Sunday, K. sees Miss Montag moving into Miss Bürstner’s room and she calls K. to give him Miss Bürstner’s message that she does not want to have a conversation with him, although she may have forgiven his previous behaviour.K. still wants to speak to Miss Bürstner once, but the attempt fails again.

Chapter — 5

• K. hears sighs from a junk room at the bank. Inside, instead of merely old discarded office materials, he finds Willem and Franz, the two officers from his arrest, along with a whipman.
• The whipman is preparing to punish the two officers, including ordering them to remove their clothes.
  Willem and Franz blame K., saying that his accusations in court have damaged their careers and reputations.
• The following day, K. opens the room again and finds everything exactly as it was — Everything was exactly the same as he had seen it when he had opened the door the previous evening. The forms and bottles of ink just inside the doorway, the whip-man with his cane, the two policemen, still undressed, the candle on the shelf, and the two policemen began to wail and call out "Mr. K.!"
• K. closes the door, a tear runs down his cheek out of exhaustion and frustration.

Chapter — 6

• Uncle Albert of K. treats the accusation as a grave family crisis, while K., the person actually accused, behaves unusually casually and quietly.
• The official director is sitting almost invisibly in Doctor Huld’s dark, sickroom. His presence was known after a long while.
• The sick lawyer’s room becomes an informal setting for discussing K.’s judicial fate, as his uncle and the other two discuss the possibility of ceasing the trial.
• Leni appears to have an intimate connection with Huld (Albert’s friend), yet almost immediately turns her attention towards K. when he leaves the room.
• Leni attempts to influence K.’s approach to his trial with the question of his accusation and whether he should confess.
• K. very strategically, tells Leni that remaining with Elsa would be advantageous because Elsa knows nothing about his trial and, even if she did, she would neither interfere nor try to persuade him to confess.
• K. experiences attraction, guilt over betraying Elsa, and yet almost immediately becomes eager to see Leni again.
• K.’s private behaviour directly interferes with the legal discussion concerning his case; even seemingly private encounters have consequences for his position in the mysterious court system.

Chapter — 7

• K.’s lawyer had asked him hardly any questions, and there were so many questions to be asked. Sometimes he would give K. some vague warning of the sort you give to children.
• The first documents submitted in court are sometimes not even read by the court.
• The accused and his defence do not have access even to the court records, and especially not to the indictment, and that means they generally do not know what the first documents need to be about.
• In fact, defence is not really allowed under the law; it is only tolerated.
• Counsel for the defence are not normally allowed to be present while the accused is being questioned, so afterwards, at the door of the interview room, he has to learn what he can about it from him.
• The most important thing is the lawyer’s personal connections. That is where the real value of taking counsel lies.
• Once a defendant has taken on a certain lawyer, he has to stay with him whatever happens.
• Mostly, the documents submitted and created with hard work are lying on the desk. They have been sent back as they cannot be carried through to the next stage in the trial, and they are just worthless scraps of paper.
• The judges cannot simply use new people for painting their portraits. The rules governing how the various grades of officials are painted are so many and varied, and, so secret that no one outside certain families even knows them.
• There are three possibilities: absolute acquittal, apparent acquittal, and deferment. Absolute acquittal is probably possible only if the accused is innocent. The second acquittal is followed by the third arrest, the third acquittal by the fourth arrest, and so on. That is what is meant by the term apparent acquittal. Deferment consists of keeping proceedings permanently in their earliest stages.
• One day, no one expects it, some judge or other picks up the documents and looks more closely at them. He notices that this particular case is still active and orders the defendant’s immediate arrest.

Chapter — 8

• A businessman named Block was staying at Dr. Huld’s home, and his trial had been going on for the last five years. He told K. about certain superstitions, for example, that one could learn a great deal about the outcome of a defendant’s case by looking at his face, especially the shape of his lips. K. learned that, from the shape of his lips, they could supposedly tell that he would definitely be found guilty very soon.
• There was probably no way of contacting the great lawyers. They fought cases, but no one knew who they were or how to reach them.
• The accused were attractive to Leni because they were struggling with their trials and legal proceedings.
• The lawyer was showing little regard for the dignity of his position. Although he seemed to be very busy as a lawyer and was also a rich man, neither the loss of income nor the loss of a client could have been of much importance to him in itself.
• When Block was beckoned by the lawyer, he acted like his slave. He was no longer treated merely as a client; he had become almost the lawyer’s dog. Leni kept him confined there, and he repeatedly read the papers given to him by Dr. Huld. He would sometimes sleep in the house merely for the chance to speak to the lawyer. Leni and Dr. Huld were like masters to him, and K. was astonished by this scene.

Chapter seems to end abruptly.

Chapter — 9

While inside the cathedral, a priest calls K. by name and tells him a fable, which had earlier been published as “Before the Law,” and which is meant to explain his situation. The priest tells K. that the parable is an ancient text of the Court, and that many generations of court officials have interpreted it differently.

Chapter — 10

In Chapter 10, a different level of understanding can be seen between the officials and K. when they come to take him away.

By the end of Chapter, on the eve of K.’s thirty-first birthday, he is taken by two officials to a secluded area and executed. Yet it is still not revealed what his offence actually was. One of the officials stabs him in the heart with a knife, and K.’s last words are: “Like a dog!”

Book Review —

I believe this Kafkaesque work would be loved the most by the ones in the field of judiciary.

The Trial is a German-language novel written by Czech writer Franz Kafka, who never intended for the public to read it. Suffering from tuberculosis, he left explicit instructions to his lifelong friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to burn all of his unfinished manuscripts upon his death. Brod defied these wishes and edited the fragmented chapters for publication in 1925.

Kafka, through this book, represents the haunting condition of an innocent man who is accused of an unknown offence and falls into the never-ending cycle of a totalitarian bureaucratic judicial system. The functioning of the judicial system has been explained elaboratively in the novel. It feels like the system is absurd as compared to the existing ones, but the idea is scary: what if this is the actual reality of judicial systems?

The novel is written in the third person. Chapter 8 remains incomplete, and Kafka’s final vision for The Trial remains unknown.