But with every sentence the reader takes in, it feels increasingly likely that the reason for K.’s arrest will remain a mystery.Īs The Trial follows its tragic path deeper into K.’s insular, menacing, and sexualized world, it gradually becomes clear that the answer was never forthcoming. By withholding knowledge from the protagonist and the reader, Kafka dangles the promise that all will be revealed in the end. As the novelist David Foster Wallace noted in his essay “ Laughing with Kafka,” this is Kafka’s whole schtick, and it’s what makes him so funny. Kafka’s restrained prose-the secret ingredient that makes this story about a bank clerk navigating bureaucracy into an electrifying page-turner-trades on a kind of dramatic irony. As Kafka puts it in the second-to-last chapter, “The Cathedral:” “the proceedings gradually merge into the judgment.” Eventually his accusers decide he must be guilty, and he is summarily executed. navigates a labyrinthine network of bureaucratic traps-a dark parody of the legal system-he keeps doing things that make him look guilty. is arrested, but can’t seem to find out what he’s accused of.
In Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, first published in 1925, a year after its author’s death, Josef K.
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