The Trial

This was my first read by Franz Kafka. I had heard a lot about Kafka & so thought will give it a try, & it turned out to be a good & different kind of read.

Its a weird kind of story. Infact I kept reading the book looking for some meaning in the course of events, but no such revelation came. So probably in my attempt to look for overall meaning, I missed the subtle meanings in different chapters of the book. Maybe when I read the next time I shall be more patient with the book.

What happens in the story is, the protagonist, Joseph K, one fine day finds himself arrested. He is never told [nor are we], for what reason he is arrested. Then the story moves ahead describing how his life is affected by this & how he is not able to concentrate on anything but his trial. & in the end he is executed in some unknown corner of the city.

For me this story portrayed the helplessness of a human being in this world of arbit customs & beliefs. We keep saying that our destiny is in our hands, we make our life with our deeds & actions. But in this story, there is some law, bureaucracy which is above human freedom. The protagonist is so helpless, he could neither find out his fault nor how could he redeem himself. He had no control over the course of events. And it was not some super power, but mere other human beings which went & controlled & ended his life.

I felt that it is a kind of novel, in which the author leaves a lot to reader's imagination. There can be different interpretations to the same story.

One of the interpretations of this story, by Jean Paul Sartre, is quite impressive. I found this analogy between a jewish life & that of the protagonist on net & it says..

"This is perhaps one of the meanings of The Trial by the Jewish Kafka. Like the hero of that novel, the Jewish person is engaged in a long trial. He does not know his judges, scarcely even his lawyers; he does not know what he is charged with, yet he knows that he is considered guilty; judgment is continually put off -- for a week, two weeks -- he takes advantage of these delays to improve his position in a thousand ways, but every precaution taken at random pushes him a little deeper into guilt. His external situation may appear brilliant, but the interminable trial invisibly wastes him away, and it happens eventually ... that men seize him, carry him off on the pretense that he has lost his case, and murder him in some vague area of the suburbs."

In fact Joseph K felt he was innocent altogether. But when asked innocent of what, he had no answer. So was he guilt? Is every human being guilty?Under which law?