The Trial Analysis: The political, juridical and philosophical interpretations. Anonymous 12th Grade

The Trial is the most well-known novel of Franz Kafka, published in Berlin in 1926. The original manuscripts were collected and prepared fo publishing by Max Brod, Kafka’s closest friend, two years after the author’s death. Brod says that the manuscript didn’t have a title, but Kafka always referred it as ‘The Trial’. Kafka considered this book unfinished, even though the last chapter was already written. Kafka thought that he needed to add some more facets to the mysterious trial, however Brod says that if he didn’t know that Kafka wanted to continue this work, he wouldn’t be able to realise the book was not finished.

The novel tells the story of a banker, who one days gets arrested by two police for a crime that isn’t told to him or to the reader. The unusual arrest for unnamed charges leaves the ill-fortuned Joseph K confused and lost in the labyrinths of the juridical system. Desperate and overwhelmed, he imagines scenarios and tricks that eventually lead him to live the legal nightmare and the absurdity of life. Not knowing anymore whom to trust, he compiles his own ‘defense’ and in which he accepts the crime and begs for forgiveness, signing so his punishment and eventually his execution. In the last chapter, Joseph K is...