Author : Franz Kafka
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (78 download)
Book Synopsis The Trial Annotated And Illustrated Book by : Franz Kafka
Download or read book The Trial Annotated And Illustrated Book written by Franz Kafka and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-30 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If we look at the novel in terms of its opening sentence, we see that this sentence contains nothing but unproven assumptions: "Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." Until the end of the book, this atmosphere of ambivalence, temporariness, and possible deception is reflected in Kafka's language. Slander, which perhaps comes to mind when we focus on the word "traduced," is not likely to be the reason for K.'s arrest because he remains at large. The trouble is we will not know the reason at the end of the story either, though one warder's remark that "K. claims to be innocent and doesn't even know the Law" gives us a certain hint. Yet no legal charges are leveled and no verdict is passed. The trial takes place before an invisible Court without ever getting off the ground, at least in the conventional sense of the phrase.All this leads one to think of the novel's title in terms of the connotations of the German original. "Prozess" is cognate with the English "process," and Kafka uses it interchangeably with "Verfahren" ("procedure"), which in turn has definite undertones of "entanglement." In other words, we are not necessarily dealing with a trial but perhaps a lifelong "process" of some kind. After all, everybody and everything belongs to the Court, as we are told time and again.Certainly the timing of K.'s arrest, whatever its meaning, the morning of his thirtieth birthday, is well chosen: birthdays, especially one marking off a decade, tend to cause some soul-searching. Block, the tradesman, is also to be arrested shortly after the death of his wife - that is, at a moment when the routine of his life suffers a decisive break. At any rate, K. is caught by surprise and is in no way prepared to fend off the characters arresting him. If he were at the Bank, where he is thoroughly familiar with every detail, nothing of the kind would happen to him. He admits that much to Frau Grubach during the evening following his arrest: he regrets he did not have the presence of mind to ignore the unexpected events of that morning (for example, Anna did not bring his coffee) - in short, he did not act "reasonably." As in so many of his other pieces, Kafka shows his hero waking up and being unprepared. It is Kafka's way of saying that K.'s arrest is not a dream but inescapable reality.