Customer Reviews

The Trial

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Reading Franz Kafka makes you feel like you are living in a dream - usually a nightmare. The Trial follows Joseph K for a year; the man is accused, apparently without cause, of a crime. He never discovers what crime.

As K struggles to prove his innocence in a secret and subjective court, Kafka reveals K's psychological deterioration. The controlled banker is slowly transformed into a nervous and unstable defendant.

The continual presence of the 'case' also brings out K's flaws. Instead of confident, he is exposed as arrogant. Instead of ambitious, he is self-centred. He coldly uses people. He becomes isolated.

In the end K surrenders to the situation's senselessness.

The Trial confronts humanity's helplessness by investigating the nature of torture. By depicting fear. Kafka leaves us hoping for some higher power; something or someone to make life meaningful.

Kafka depicts a terrifying world, a man lost in a world of utter unintelligibility - it is the horror story of the 20th century, where man has sought to negate both his own intelligibility and that of the world. Kafka pre-empts the regimes of Stalin, Hitler and all the other crazies of the 20th Century.