The Trial by Franz Kafka is one of those books that continues to bewilder many readers even a century after it was written. As a student and critic of existential lit and philosophy, Jim Algie makes a case for the novel’s ongoing relevance.
Among the dwindling number of scholars devoted to early 20th century literature lit and existential philosophy, The Trial is one of the main sourcebooks, vying with Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevski for having the greatest influence. Both novels star unlikable protagonists. Both are composed of seemingly random incidents. Neither has a traditional story arc nor any standard-issue character development.
The stranger elements in the work of Kafka suggest a world where reason and logic have broken down. Life no longer makes sense. Why is there a hole in the middle of the courtroom floor? Shouldn’t someone fix that? Details like this are not so much tragic, or even surreal, as absurd. This is one of his most enduring influence on literature and theater. A few decades after Kafka’s death, the Theatre of the Absurd playwrights, such as Beckett, Pinter and Ionesco, picked up his baton and ran marathons with it.
The alienation that shadows Kafka’s characters has made him into an avatar of the new digital generation. In a New York Times story by Amanda Hess to commemorate the centennial of Kafka’s death in 2024, she writes of a TikToker, “The alienation and anxiety that Mouka finds in Kafka have come to define her generation. ‘We’re constantly online and we’re constantly connected somewhere, but we still feel disconnected,’ she said.”
As vague as the plot of The Trial may sometimes be (we never learn why Joseph K has been arrested or what the charges against him are), there is a through line in the novel. That is the question of guilt and punishment, which were two of Dostoyevki’s main preoccupations. Throughout the book, Joseph K maintains his innocence. Only in the final scene, when the protagonist is marched to his execution by two thugs, does he ever admit to any wrongdoing. “I always snatched at the world like I had 20 hands. And not for a very laudable motive either. That was wrong…”
It’s a powerful scene that also asks a fundamentally existential question: Aren’t we all sentenced to death in the end?
You could fill a university library with all the essays and theses about The Trial. Political scientists have seen the novel as presaging the communist show trials and Stalinist purges of the ensuing decades. Some critics have read it as a condemnation of the soulless bureaucracies which govern our lives and stamp us out like cockroaches. Theologians have noted that one of the climactic scenes takes place in a church where Joseph K encounters a priest who tells him a parable.
Why the church? Who’s the priest? What does the parable really mean, if anything? Is the entire novel a quest for truth and meaning in a world where neither add up to very much? Is life, and even this book, pointless?
The fact that Kafka never spells out any such interpretations has kept all The Trial’s mysteries intact. As the Nobel laureate Albert Camus, whose allegorical novel, The Plague, recasts the Nazi invasion as an infestation of rats, and has Kafka’s fingerprints all over it, said, “The Trial is a book that asks everything and answers nothing.”
Maybe that’s why we’re still reading and discussing it more than a century after the author told his literary executor to burn the manuscript once tuberculosis had stolen Kafka’s final breath.
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