The court he is judged in turns out to be a secret one. All his efforts only show his helplessness and the inevitability of the punishment for a crime he does not even know anything about. In fact, the whole story is about K.’s attempts to find out anything that would clarify his situation, and trying to legally defend himself against something he cannot understand the essence of. Despite that, he finds it impossible to reveal anything even about the nature of the charges however hard he tries. The main character is initially convinced that he is “living in a free country”, where everything is “at peace, all laws” are “decent and upheld” ( The Trial 5). The story itself begins with a sentence, “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested” ( The Trial 1). One of the central themes in The Trial is the theme of bureaucracy, law, and an individual’s utter powerlessness against them. After that, we will proceed to considering some of the possible interpretations of the text, and, finally, we will discuss some parallels between the Kafkaesque law and contemporary American system of judgment. In our paper, we will look into this theme by discussing the main features of the trial against the novel’s protagonist. One of his novels, Der Process (The Trial), was written in 1914-1915 and first published in 1925 (Brown 487-489) it addresses the theme of law, its agents, and the person’s helplessness against them. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is considered to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

The trial novel by franz kafka