Category: The Trial

The opening lines of Franz Kafkas The Trial are one of the most chilling and memorable of all time. A well-established chief banker, Josef K. is suddenly arrested one day by unidentified agents from an unidentified organization for committing an unidentified crime. What follows is a host of absurdities: the guilt of the protagonist is…

Kafka’s Trial questions the relationship of justice and the law (often capitalized in the novel as ‘the Law’). The thing about laws is that they’re supposed to be just. If there’s an unjust or an unfair law, we expect to be able to work to get the law overturned by appealing to higher principles of…

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) has been called everything from a modernist to an existentialist, a fantasy writer to a realist. His work almost stands alone as its own subgenre, and the adjective Kafkaesque  whose meaning, like the meaning of Kafkas work, is hard to pin down  has become well-known even to people who have…