Franz Kafka "The Trial"
Franz Kafka's possibly unfinished novel, "The Trial," is one of the great mysteries of modernist literature. It was at once an astute, even prescient critique of modern power structures as well as a novel that does not quite make sense from a literary perspective. Left on the shelf by Kafka in 1915, the book was published in 1925 during the tense interwar period, which was, not coincidentally, the heyday of Modernist literature. Like most Modernist writers, Kafka used his art to express his sense of alienation and powerlessness in an increasingly hostile, meaningless, and dehumanized world. Thesis: "The Trial" is a critique of the bureaucratized nature of power in modern society and its effect on the modern individual's will. K.'s attempts to understand the purpose of the power structure persecuting him are frustrated because the power structure has no actual meaning or purpose, existing instead for the sole purpose of following is own rules and internal logic.
1) The court house: Its claustrophobic nature and labyrinthine structure to further clarify the theme of bureaucratic excess.
Kafka's introduces his reader to the power structure of modern society by illustrating the physical structures which represent its power. He describes the first structure that K. encounters, the court house, as being difficult to access as if on purpose. On his first visit, he goes "...over to the stairway to get to the room where the hearing was to take place, but then stood still again as besides these steps he could see three other stairway entrances, and there also seemed to be a small passageway at the end of the yard leading into a second yard." (28). It is clear that the structure is not designed to serve the needs of outsiders such as the general public which it supposedly serves. Indeed, it is doubtful if the structure is designed to serve the needs of humans at all.
The court house, which is built to maintain order, appears rather to make a fetish out of order. This fetish is illustrated by the symmetry of the four stairway entrances that K. encounters when he steps into the building for the first time....
And yet in his personal life despite the anguish he wrote about so eloquently he enjoyed modern novelties such as the cinema, aeroplanes, and motor-cycles. He went swimming and followed the vogue for nudism. He had his fair share of sexual affairs, and he complemented those with visits to brothels (Johnson, 2005). Doubts about his work caused Kafka before his death to ask that all of his unpublished manuscripts be
He is taken outside, where the fresh air revives him. In this Chapter, K. suffers two types of defeat; first the defeat of his aborted sexual conquest that would ultimately be a victory over the Magistrate, and secondly the defeat of the air making him unable to go the Court offices. He is physically unable to be in the vicinity of the Court, and therefore unable to attempt to
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Kafka's Trial "Here there is no why" Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz. Attempting to determine what Franz Kafka really meant in any of his stories is a difficult undertaking, given the absurdity and irrationality of the situations he describes and characters that do not seem to function or react as 'normal' human beings. This is especially true in his unfinished novel The Trial, where the young and successful bank executive Joseph K. is
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