Chapter 7 and the Lecture

           This past week Mr. Shapiro has been lecturing about Franz Kafka and the reoccurring elements that appear in all of his stories and books. Lucky enough for our group, we are able to apply this new information that we learned into our term paper book. The main premise of the lecture involved three pillars that control society as a whole: church, state, and family. We are seeing this occur in The Trial more and more as the book progresses.

            In Chapter 7 particularly, we see this happen with the state. K. is engulfed in a trial and it is in this chapter that he starts to become more and more obsessed with it. In my opinion, K. is starting to see that the system that we instill our trust into might not be as honest as everyone believes. In fact, he is debating whether or not to fire his lawyer but does not because the courts are somewhat corrupted due to lawyers having relationships with some of the judges in the court system.

            What has been most interesting for me in this chapter is that as a reader, we are able to see that giant impact that this trial is beginning to have on K.’s life. He is even starting to give up the one thing that he used to care about the most: work. Before the trial, K. would have never forgot what a client was saying to him or leave multiple clients in his waiting room without acknowledging them before suddenly leaving without any notice. In my opinion, this relates back to the gist of the lecture as a whole. We are now seeing that K.’s whole life is being dictated by one particular pillar: state. Because of that, all of the other pillars are going to start to be affected. I think that Kafka is going to show later on that his familial relationships are starting to take a toll as well. Due to the fact that we learned that K. is not a very religious guy, I do not think that we will see the church make an impact on his life.