Final Paper!

Camille Kelleher

Mr. Shapiro

AP English Literature and Composition

5 May 2014

Franz Kafka’s The Trial: Human Institutions and the Absurd

In his novel The Trial, Franz Kafka describes Josef K.’s encounter with a hidden totalitarian government and his transformation under the noted government’s pressures and disturbances in his life. The ongoing madness and Josef K.’s personal destruction captures the vulnerability of human institutions like the church, family, and state to human desires and the absurd, an existential idea that gives no meaning in the world besides the one that humans assign to it. Kafka criticizes mankind’s innate and destructive logic to create societal institutions that confine citizens and inevitably lead to the failure of human values and beliefs. These institutions attempt to deceive citizens by hiding life’s chaos and uncertainty, a process highlighted by the court system.

Throughout the book, Josef K. meets multiple characters who maintain their own different roles in society and possess exclusive knowledge of the court system. Their respective influence in the court system varies by character, but all of their interactions in the court system lead to minimal progress for Josef K.’s trial. All of them have inconsequential effect in Josef K.’s trial because they are subservient to the totalitarian government (Emen). Josef K.’s interactions vary with the characters given their role in society. Block the Merchant signifies a citizen who is enslaved to human institutions and causes his own self-destruction because he is attached to ideals designed to fail. He is overly conscious about his position in society and interactions with Josef K. because he establishes his opinion on artificial human values. When Josef K. asks him about his past with lawyers, he replies, “I’ll confide in part, but you have to tell me a secret too, so that we both have something to hold over the other with regard to the lawyer” (Kafka Ch. 8). His inability to escape the human institutions leads to self-destruction both in his personal life and career. He hired five more lawyers because he does not want to overlook anything that could be valuable to his case and spent everything on his trial attempting to ensure unconquerable success. While Block is trying to solve the system, there are other characters that simply accept its abusiveness.

Titorelli the Painter provides a different perspective on the court system. He paints portraits of court officials and gossips about the court with Josef K., but acts like a beggar when he tries to sell his artwork. The manufacturer who suggested that Josef K. talk to him says, “a person is naturally reluctant to allow himself to be advised by a fellow like that” (Kafka Ch. 7). Josef K. still talks to Titorelli because Titorelli encompass the same characteristics, illusive and ignorant, that judges possess since he personally works with them. Even though he is a source of information for Josef K., Titorelli is just another interconnected member of the court. His apartment is directly connected to the courtroom and provides intimate access for the judges to enter his bedroom. Titorelli represents the opposite of his role as a painter, one of creativity and freedom, because the judges demand to be painted “like the great judges of old” (Kafka Ch. 7). Titorelli says that he tends “to lose a good deal of artistic energy” because “the rules for painting the various levels of officials are so numerous, so varied, and above all so secret, that they simply are not known beyond certain families” (Kafka Ch. 7). The extent of control and censorship over Titorelli’s work is supported by all of his paintings following the same formula (Emen). Titorelli tries to sell different pieces of his artwork to Josef K. but all of the pieces look exactly the same, “It may have been intended as a companion piece, but not the slightest difference could be seen between it and the first one” (Kafka Ch. 7). The lack of freedom or creativity in his work establishes that Titorelli is merely a tool of the court system (Emen). Titorelli knows a lot about the court system and the judges but is unable to help progress K’s case. Although Titorelli works independently for the judges, the men who work for the system see Josef K.’s outsider-like weakness.

During his arrest, Josef K. talks to the inspector who accepts the idea of chaos and the absurd in everyday life. When Josef K. continues to hammer the inspector with primary questions about his case, the inspector replies, “think less about us and what is going to happen to you, and instead think more about yourself” (Kafka Ch. 1). This signals the start of Josef K.’s transformation from accepting the human institutions to eventually rejecting them at the end of the book.

Superstitions and traditions are prime examples for symptoms of human institutions that confine citizens and ultimately lead to the inevitable failure of human values and beliefs. They allow humans to place blame and effort on theoretical forces that have no definite effect on the respective humans’ futures and societal standings, “Don’t forget in proceedings like this there are always lots of different things coming up to talk about, things that you just cannot understand with reason alone, you just get too tired and distracted for most things and so, instead, people rely on superstition” (Kafka Ch. 8). There are plenty of irrelevant superstitions that exist in the court that determine the verdict, displacing the legitimacy of logic and reasoning, “There are lots who believe that, and they said they could see from the shape of your lips that you’d definitely be found guilty very soon” (Kafka Ch. 8). When society is characterized by superstitions, even though they are disproved by facts, it is hard to avoid them and they can have serious effects on decisions.  One tradition that is present in Josef K.’s trial is the reliance on lawyers. Lawyers are needed to win cases because they know how to manipulate the court system to win their cases. This is determined by their ability to manipulate other people and their decisions. Lawyers support a set of beliefs that theoretically yield a successful and evident conclusion.

The pursuit of success and a final, concrete conclusion is another tradition based on society’s absurd belief set. After Josef K. was initially arrested, he received a phone call from a court associate relaying information about his initial inquiry schedule. Josef K. was left with a false pretense that “they had selected the expedient of this succession of closely spaced but brief inquiries” (Kafka Ch. 2). The court had to disillusion Josef K. because he is only comfortable with the idea that it was everyone’s “general interest to bring his trial to a rapid conclusion (Kafka Ch. 2)” when this is actually unimportant to the court. Josef K.’s attachment to societal pretenses has no significance in the court system and even the universe at all. In the story, Josef K. tries so hard to conclude his case and maintain his innocence that he disowns his personal life and struggles to live because he simply cannot adopt a different set of societal beliefs.

Titorelli’s offering of different outcomes for Josef K.’s case shows the court’s alternate set of values and beliefs. Josef K. becomes more unsettled when he realizes that neither of the choices have a definitive conclusion and answer. The first option of apparent acquittal turns Josef K.’s trial into a viscous cycle of acquittals and arrests. The second option of protraction leaves his trial at the lowest level of the court without any progression past the initial stage. After listening to the descriptions of both options, Josef K.’s “head ached from the effort he had made to force himself to listen” (Kafka Ch. 7), Josef K. will never be at peace with his case and he has to accept that the future involves the court system’s pressure for control over his life. The totalitarian government leaves no freedom for its dependents and Josef K. has yet to accept and become comfortable with this idea because he cannot give up his autonomy that was present in his life before he was arrested. This whole conflict and lack of peace leaves Josef K. wanting more and making worse decisions because of his lack of flexibility.

The allegory presented by the prison chaplain in the cathedral addresses the paradox that humans believe ideas, values, and beliefs even though they cannot physically see it and its proof. It is about a man who is desperately trying to gain permission to enter a door and he dies before his wish is granted (Kafka). Everything about the plot is logical, but the setting and characters are somewhat allusive and are not at all identical with reality. The characters do not have any human characteristics or traits and are rather translated to motives. The man from the countryside is a persistent desire while the doorkeeper is like an obstacle to the identity of a hidden Law that neither of them knows (Deinert). The man from the countryside who is waiting for permission from the doorkeeper is like the man who is looking for freedom but always blocks himself from it or the man who is looking for absolute happiness but can never find it. They are all the same characters, a man desiring an absolute ideal that does not exist in reality (Deinert). This describes Josef K., because he never achieves a sense of isolation from the court system. There is no exit from the court system and there is no way to avoid the system. It is an absolute that engulfs everyone even though it cannot be felt nor perceived.

Josef K. loses a sense of hope and ambition as he spends more time under arrest and experiences the institution’s limitations. His transformation from before he was arrested to the end of his life highlights the weaknesses of the bureaucracy created by humans. Although Josef K. is nowhere near an adolescent figure at the beginning of the book, he has a sense of optimism as Chief Financial Officer for his bank and the future with Fraulein in his boarding house. He was aware of life’s unanticipated distractions and hardships, “When you’ve been in the world for thirty years already and had to you’re your won way though everything yourself, which as been my lot, then you become hardened to surprises and don’t take them too hard” (Kafka Ch. 1). Josef K. does not think the arrest is important because he assumes he is rightfully innocent since he has not committed a crime. On page 14 of the book (Kafka), Josef K. brainstorms many questions about his trial that are all based on logical observations and reasoning. Yet, as time continues after he gets arrested, he becomes more pessimistic about life and society in general and he realizes that there is really no definitive goal for humans to achieve in their lives. He becomes more secure with the idea that humans all have the same fate regardless of their class, gender, age, race, and culture. A sense of the human condition shines through near the end of Josef K.’s transformation: concerns including the meaning of life, search for gratification or evident conclusion, inevitability of isolation, and the awareness of the inescapability (Contributors). The men who kill Josef K. are formal and of higher society in order to show that an individual’s role is irrelevant to his vulnerability to hidden and oppressive institutions. Right before his execution, Josef K. realizes that the men who are able to thrive in the totalitarian driven society, like the executors, give up all instincts that would allow them to thrive in competitive, naturally selective reality and screams, “Like a dog!...as if the shame of it should outlive him” (Kafka Ch. 10). People’s perspectives and influences on an individual are more important than how an individual lives their lives, and that was Josef K.’s weakness in this totalitarian and bureaucratic environment.

Franz Kafka’s descriptive characters and their roles in the court system, the confinement of superstitions and traditions, the cathedral allegory, and Josef K.’s transformation highlights his vulnerability to manmade institutions like the totalitarian government and bureaucracy. This criticism of mankind’s innate and destructive logic places the importance of reality below the absurd and its ability to deceive all individuals.

Works Cited

Contributors, Wikipedia. Wikipedia. 24 4 2014. 4 5 2014 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_condition>.

Deinert, Herbert. "Kafka's Parable Before the Law." The Germanic Review (1964): unkwn.

Emen, Jake. Yahoo Voices. 27 6 2007. 13 4 2014 <http://voices.yahoo.com/franz-kafkas-trial-stylistic-perspective-on-401000.html?cat=38>.

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Trans. Breon Mitchell. New York: Schocken Books, 1998.