The Trial

Published posthumously in 1924 by Kafka’s friend, Max Trod, after his death, The Trial is a criticism of a totalitarian form of government, which traps an individual into systems of oppression and inhibits them from any means of escape. The protagonist of the story, Josef K, is accused of a crime that he didn’t commit. The absurdity of the entire ordeal, however, is that the nature of the crime is never revealed to him or to us, the readers. The more Josef K ventures into systems of authority and ‘justice’, to prove his innocence, the more he becomes entangled in the procedural complexities of the court and the justice system. His attempt to prove his innocence only implicates him further and the increasing uncertainty of his fate propels him towards making misguided choices.
Kafka’s works, more often than not, portray a bleak, hopeless world where a just society and governance is more a matter of imagination than reality. He compels his readers to question the monotony of the systems around them as well as structures of authority. Kafka’s The Trial represents a solemn yet surreal world where an individual is isolated; his freedom and his rights stifled; and any ‘trial’ that occurs is simply a farce wherein different structures of authority push an individual into an inescapable maze.