![]() 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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