Who slandered Josef K. in Franz Kafka’s "The Trial"?
====================================================
Wolran Kim
April 2014
“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested” (3). From the first sentence of Kafka’s The Trial, the thought that living itself incurs guilt appears. In fact, humans are condemned men who are born with sentences, at most a hundred years later. If humans are seen as the existences of status, and that sentence to death is suspended, The Trial may be observed as an original sin of Christianity.
The Trial seems to be a fragmented collection, such as puzzle pieces that do not fit together, that are incomplete. Each fragment is a straightforward description of the detail, but the whole picture is strange. It is grotesque and irrational, and it might be said to be “Kafkaesque.” Most of the scenes are distinctly surreal, unfolding in a dreamlike fashion. Thus each fragment can be a piece of a different picture, depending on the reader. Also, this could be an advantage that Kafka‘s novel can be viewed under infinite analyses and interpretations.
This work will show how the Titorelli sequence (pp. 139-165) in The Trial can be interpreted as connecting to the possible thesis, self-destruction with the invisible Law, the untouchable Court, and social irregularities. Through detailed analysis of the figures (Titorelli, girls, environment, and pictures) and Titorelli’s advice, the subject of each figure is shown.
In The Trial, different times and places are frequently met and coexist in new spaces together. “He drove at once to the painter, who lived in suburb that lay in a completely opposite direction from the one with the law court offices” (139-140). Josef K. goes in a completely opposite direction to meet Titorelli, but he meets another courtroom behind the door by Titorelli’s bed. Also, K. sees another space where two warders are beaten from a flogger in his bank.
This spatiotemporal mixture is seen as one of Picasso’s paintings, such as the front face on the side or the front face on the back. K. strays about the Court, projecting anywhere and anytime between different desires and views. K. changes into different figures in each scene. K. wants to seek the exit in the maze of the untouchable Court. The Trial emerges as a figure of Cubism, and this imagery becomes an effective way to express the invisible Law.
Firstly, the place of Titorelli looks like the Court that K. visits the very first time. Throughout the book, the Court is associated with darkness, dust, staleness, and suffocation; K. repeatedly suffers from the lack of fresh air. Considering common sense about the image of a courtroom, it is very unreal and outrageous. Titorelli’s neighborhood is also poor (even poorer), and is described with messy words such as darker, filth floating, disgusting, steaming yellow fluid, and rat.
Why is the Court drawn so darkly, uncleanly, and terrifyingly? The description of the environmental and spatial impurity may be connected to the absurdity of the Court. Physical and outward appearances often show internal status and practical situations. The paper that had been wrapped around fish smells of fish. The locations and maze-like structure of the Court represent the social roughness, abnormality, and irregularities.
In the scene of the encounter between K. and Titorelli, the figure of the girls is bizarre. The teenage girls stay around them from the time K. enters the neighborhood until K. leaves. The teenage girls are running, being nosy, peeping, listening, and keep bothering Titorelli and K. Their appearances look like clowns who jump and dance on the stage without any particular role. Titorelli never drives the girls away despite them continuing to bother and scream at him.
Somehow, Titorelli and the girls seem as confederates in the dirty Eden of this chaotic show. K. gets the impression that the girls are corrupt little girls; “Their faces as well as the guard of honor they formed conveyed a mixture of childishness and depravity” (141). Through the behavior of the girls, K. depicts them as fallen teenagers. “[T]hen she lifted her little skirt” (141); this behavior reminds him of the washer woman and Leni’s aggressive sexuality. K. lies to the girls about the reason why he wants to go see Titorelli. He must not want to deal with the girls, and knows that they will just annoy him.
According to a one-sided portrayal of K., the existence of the girls is meaningless. However, there is the reverse; “Those girls belong to the court as well” (150). Incomprehensibly, the girls have connections with the court while K. represents them depravedly and corruptly. Titorelli says, “Everything belongs to the court” (150). “Everything” implies a few different meanings here. Firstly, it might be something insignificant or unworthy. Secondly, it could be referring to everything in the world, literally. Lastly, it might represent the biblical implication that God knows everything that you do; “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known” (Luke 12:2).
Another verse is, “Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Luke 12:7a). The fact that the girls have connections with the Court means that K. cannot disregard them anymore. The girls’ connections also show that the court is everywhere, invisible, insidious, and known by its effects. Therefore, there is no place that K. can be comfortable or relax. K. cannot be free anytime and anywhere. He is completely surrounded. This analysis can be inferred from the last scene, in which K. is led away by Court functionaries who hold him by the arms. K cannot escape from the invisible Law and the untouchable Court.
Considering the women characters in The Trial, K. says to the priest in the cathedral, “[w]omen have great power. If I could get a few of the women I know to join forces and work for me, I could surely make it through. Particularly with this court, which consists almost entirely of skirt chasers” (213). In connection to the girls, all the female characters are described as a lower social class for their gender, compared to the protagonist K., described as a successful banker.
All the female characters (Landlady Frau Grubach, Fräulein Bürstner, washer woman, and Leni as Lawyer Huld’s nurse) appear briefly and quickly disappear as if they are evaporating figures in a dreamed landscape. They seem to try to take on their roles, but never do and nothing really happens. They, including the girls who have no power economically, socially, and politically, may be seen as tools of power.
Titorelli gives K. much better advice than Lawyer Huld, despite his social status being much lower than the lawyer as an official Court painter. “Are you innocent?” (148); this clear question is the first direct inquiry toward K’s suffering. Thus, this short question creates a little hope because Uncle Karl and Lawyer Huld were never concerned about K’s innocence. The readers never know what K.’s charge is, but Titorelli counsels with the most direct and experienced legal narrations for K.’s situation. However, not surprisingly, his advice is also Kafkaesque.
The fragments of his suggestions are very logical, but the conclusion is paradox. K. also points out Titorelli’s contradictions; Titorelli offers to use his connections to help K.’s case. He describes “three possible acquittals, actual acquittal, apparent acquittal, and protraction” (152). These possible solutions seem very logical, and Titorelli asks, “Have you noticed I sound almost like a lawyer?” (151). However, his conclusion is full of inconsistencies; K. refutes Titorelli’s advice. “I think you’re a contradiction yourself” (153).
Titorelli ridicules K.; “You don’t seem to have a general overview of the court yet” (150), and he also persuades K.; “We’re talking about two different things here, what the Law says, and what I’ve experienced personally” (153). Titorelli’s guidance is momentary and never helps K. escape from his guilt. Titorelli’s discourse clearly shows how the novel portrays outrageous images through existential detail. ”I must admit—I never saw a single actual acquittal” (153-154); If so, nothing matters, whether K. is innocent or guilty. Titorelli undoubtedly tells the nature of the trial; K.’s prosecution is not because of his guilt, but K. is guilty because of his prosecution.
Eventually, Titorelli informs him that there is no way to be acquitted at the end of the trial. “No file is ever lost, and the court never forgets” (158); “After all, it’s a merely formal matter” (161). These words of Titorelli’s make K. realize the futility of his efforts, and persuade him to give up. As is the same with the other helpers, Lawyer Huld, Uncle Karl, and the Tradesman Block, Titorelli cannot help K. escape from his trial. “But they also prevent an actual acquittal” (161). Titorelli’s practical advice is very honest, but leads to stir up K.’s sense of crisis.
“Judges on the lowest level, . . . don’t have the power to grant a final acquittal, that power resides only in the highest court, which is totally inaccessible to you and me and everyone else” (158). Consequently, Titorelli’s help becomes the fifth wheel in front of the untouchable Court. As a poor painter, his legal advice has a contradicting condition standing opposite the divine Law. Also, the fact that his position in the Court is hereditary can be represented as a fixed social irrationality.
The Trial resembles Titorelli’s gloomy identical paintings of the landscape of the heath that show repetition and invisible delicate variation. Titorelli shows his three paintings to K. and says, “a companion piece” or “a similar one” (163). However, K. never understands him; “but not the slightest difference could be seen between it and the first one” (163); “It was not merely similar; however, it was exactly the same landscape” (163). To Titorelli and K., the concepts of “companion,” “similar,” and “same” are totally different from each other.
This scene is similar to Kafka’s short story, In The Penal Colony, because there is a language barrier between the Officer, the Condemned Man, and the Soldier. The Condemned Man never understands the process of an execution and even his own sentence. The terror of the power and the Law that penetrate deep into K.’s ordinary life might be analyzed as different meanings between the “same” and the “different.” K’s everyday life is far apart from politics and the Law; however his average life now becomes the Law itself.
Arrests and lawsuits become his routine, and The Trial seems like such an academic research study. As the landlady Frau Grubach’s expression goes, “It seems like something scholarly . . . that I don’t understand, but that I don’t need to understand either” (23). The Trial shows that life is politics itself beyond an isolated individual desire, existential pain, and an anti-government political life.
The encounter with the priest in the cathedral right before K. is dragged to death, gives a religious implication, aside from the political involvement. The priest’s parable tells of a country man denied by the doorkeeper at an entrance to the Law until he dies, and finds out that this entrance was meant only for him. As the country man’s nihilistic death, K. accepts his fate without resistance in front of the invisible Law and the untouchable Court. As in the encounter with the priest, “But if he turned around he was caught, for then he would have confessed that he understood quite well, that he really was the person named, and that he was prepared to obey” (211).
K. is called when the priest cries out: “Josef K.!” (211), and he answers. K. obeys after wandering to seek out the exit and realizes the impossibility. Louis Althusser says in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses that Ideology interpellates individuals as Subjects; “the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of “constituting” concrete individuals as subjects” (Althusser 698).
Social animals, humans, are the same as small insects that can never escape from the tough spider webs called society. If humans are guilty from an existing status regardless of their responsibilities, human beings live in guilt until death outside of the peaceful Eden. The original sin tells us that humans are the presences who are suspended to the sentence of death. No one can find the exit against the fate of death. “How can any person in general be guilty? We’re all human after all, each and every one of us” (213); K.’s objection is the same question of The Trial. Strangely, the attitudes of K., embarrassment, absurdity, and a victimized feeling, are gradually changed. All he can do is choose his fate by his own free will, if he cannot avoid his fate in this unavoidable circumstance.
The priest says to K., “you don’t have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary” (223). This discourse has a duality that all visible phenomena are not all, but they are inevitable; everything is not true, but it is the only way it can happen. This duality can refer to the fact that human society is not as stable, orderly, transparent, and harmonious as it looks from the outside. The systematic figures of the surface are merely looks, and the inner truth is full of absurdity, hypocrisy, and irrationality. Law books are pornographic and the judges are secular figures who sit on kitchen chairs, not on thrones. The judges are described superficially as ordinary people who are slighted from the lower painter Titorelli; “Yes, the gentlemen are vain” (146).
Bürstner says, “I‘m fascinated with court matters. The court has a strange attraction, doesn‘t it?” (29). Leni also says that accused men are extremely attractive and the fact that they’ve been indicted, make them irresistible to her. Could Bürstner and Leni say that if they were in peril of their lives? What is K.’s legal charge? Such as the Condemned Man never knowing his own sentence in In the Penal Colony, this is never discussed here. The plot of this analogy to a judgment of guilt in the wrong way shows that society is not full of common sense. Then, who is the target of the trial? In the novel, K.’s case happens one morning, suddenly, without any rational reason.
This metaphoric sense shows that K.’s trial could have happened to anyone. It does not matter who. The object of the trial is everyone, and the crime is the ignorance of the Law and the claim of human innocence. Nevertheless, humans are born not by free will. This fact might be the reason why K. wanders over the maze of the invisible Law. K.’s guilt includes metaphysical implications and the Court is a conceptual court. The trial proceeds inside of his consciousness. The consciousness is gradually dominating all of his life. This analogy may lead to the fundamental question, where am I going? and where is the end? The sense of the original sin lies in the background of The Trial.
The priest says the countryman is more mature than the doorkeeper because he “after all came of his own free will” (221). The dreamer is freer than the person without dreams, and the person who puts it into practice is freer than the dreamer. Self awareness should not be restrained by society. Self-consciousness indicates a self-controlled ego despite social restrictions. The priest says to K., “First you must see who I am” (224) replying to K.’s despair, “I can’t find my way in the dark alone” (224).
No one directly answers how K. can find the way to prove his innocence. No one probably knows. The way to show his innocence is nowhere. Regarding the original sin, life and guilt is a different person of the same name. How much of this novel reflects human reality? The Trial often describes surreal and bizarre scenes through detailed descriptions of reality. The process of Josef K.’s trial seems to be a huge symbol beyond the satire and criticism of the justice system in Kafka’s era.
In terms of the symbolic idea, the appearance of the priest at the end is associated with a religious interpretation. Regarding Christianity, humans have original sin, but no one actually knows what the sin. Yet, humans tremble from fear that humans are under God’s judgment, and no one actually knows or has ever seen who God is, the judge. Thus, humans trick themselves into wild ideas to expiate their sin despite not knowing what their sins are.
Eventually, the result that returns to humans is only death. It is a nihilistic ending. Where is the untouchable judge, God? Where is the highest court that K. never reaches? Human’s fate is never known until the end of life and it is very close. It may be just “like a dog!” leaving only “shame” behind (231). As the court usher answers, “It’s the only way” (72) to the exit: the “exit” is death.
====================================================
Wolran Kim
April 2014
“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested” (3). From the first sentence of Kafka’s The Trial, the thought that living itself incurs guilt appears. In fact, humans are condemned men who are born with sentences, at most a hundred years later. If humans are seen as the existences of status, and that sentence to death is suspended, The Trial may be observed as an original sin of Christianity.
The Trial seems to be a fragmented collection, such as puzzle pieces that do not fit together, that are incomplete. Each fragment is a straightforward description of the detail, but the whole picture is strange. It is grotesque and irrational, and it might be said to be “Kafkaesque.” Most of the scenes are distinctly surreal, unfolding in a dreamlike fashion. Thus each fragment can be a piece of a different picture, depending on the reader. Also, this could be an advantage that Kafka‘s novel can be viewed under infinite analyses and interpretations.
This work will show how the Titorelli sequence (pp. 139-165) in The Trial can be interpreted as connecting to the possible thesis, self-destruction with the invisible Law, the untouchable Court, and social irregularities. Through detailed analysis of the figures (Titorelli, girls, environment, and pictures) and Titorelli’s advice, the subject of each figure is shown.
In The Trial, different times and places are frequently met and coexist in new spaces together. “He drove at once to the painter, who lived in suburb that lay in a completely opposite direction from the one with the law court offices” (139-140). Josef K. goes in a completely opposite direction to meet Titorelli, but he meets another courtroom behind the door by Titorelli’s bed. Also, K. sees another space where two warders are beaten from a flogger in his bank.
This spatiotemporal mixture is seen as one of Picasso’s paintings, such as the front face on the side or the front face on the back. K. strays about the Court, projecting anywhere and anytime between different desires and views. K. changes into different figures in each scene. K. wants to seek the exit in the maze of the untouchable Court. The Trial emerges as a figure of Cubism, and this imagery becomes an effective way to express the invisible Law.
Firstly, the place of Titorelli looks like the Court that K. visits the very first time. Throughout the book, the Court is associated with darkness, dust, staleness, and suffocation; K. repeatedly suffers from the lack of fresh air. Considering common sense about the image of a courtroom, it is very unreal and outrageous. Titorelli’s neighborhood is also poor (even poorer), and is described with messy words such as darker, filth floating, disgusting, steaming yellow fluid, and rat.
Why is the Court drawn so darkly, uncleanly, and terrifyingly? The description of the environmental and spatial impurity may be connected to the absurdity of the Court. Physical and outward appearances often show internal status and practical situations. The paper that had been wrapped around fish smells of fish. The locations and maze-like structure of the Court represent the social roughness, abnormality, and irregularities.
In the scene of the encounter between K. and Titorelli, the figure of the girls is bizarre. The teenage girls stay around them from the time K. enters the neighborhood until K. leaves. The teenage girls are running, being nosy, peeping, listening, and keep bothering Titorelli and K. Their appearances look like clowns who jump and dance on the stage without any particular role. Titorelli never drives the girls away despite them continuing to bother and scream at him.
Somehow, Titorelli and the girls seem as confederates in the dirty Eden of this chaotic show. K. gets the impression that the girls are corrupt little girls; “Their faces as well as the guard of honor they formed conveyed a mixture of childishness and depravity” (141). Through the behavior of the girls, K. depicts them as fallen teenagers. “[T]hen she lifted her little skirt” (141); this behavior reminds him of the washer woman and Leni’s aggressive sexuality. K. lies to the girls about the reason why he wants to go see Titorelli. He must not want to deal with the girls, and knows that they will just annoy him.
According to a one-sided portrayal of K., the existence of the girls is meaningless. However, there is the reverse; “Those girls belong to the court as well” (150). Incomprehensibly, the girls have connections with the court while K. represents them depravedly and corruptly. Titorelli says, “Everything belongs to the court” (150). “Everything” implies a few different meanings here. Firstly, it might be something insignificant or unworthy. Secondly, it could be referring to everything in the world, literally. Lastly, it might represent the biblical implication that God knows everything that you do; “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known” (Luke 12:2).
Another verse is, “Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Luke 12:7a). The fact that the girls have connections with the Court means that K. cannot disregard them anymore. The girls’ connections also show that the court is everywhere, invisible, insidious, and known by its effects. Therefore, there is no place that K. can be comfortable or relax. K. cannot be free anytime and anywhere. He is completely surrounded. This analysis can be inferred from the last scene, in which K. is led away by Court functionaries who hold him by the arms. K cannot escape from the invisible Law and the untouchable Court.
Considering the women characters in The Trial, K. says to the priest in the cathedral, “[w]omen have great power. If I could get a few of the women I know to join forces and work for me, I could surely make it through. Particularly with this court, which consists almost entirely of skirt chasers” (213). In connection to the girls, all the female characters are described as a lower social class for their gender, compared to the protagonist K., described as a successful banker.
All the female characters (Landlady Frau Grubach, Fräulein Bürstner, washer woman, and Leni as Lawyer Huld’s nurse) appear briefly and quickly disappear as if they are evaporating figures in a dreamed landscape. They seem to try to take on their roles, but never do and nothing really happens. They, including the girls who have no power economically, socially, and politically, may be seen as tools of power.
Titorelli gives K. much better advice than Lawyer Huld, despite his social status being much lower than the lawyer as an official Court painter. “Are you innocent?” (148); this clear question is the first direct inquiry toward K’s suffering. Thus, this short question creates a little hope because Uncle Karl and Lawyer Huld were never concerned about K’s innocence. The readers never know what K.’s charge is, but Titorelli counsels with the most direct and experienced legal narrations for K.’s situation. However, not surprisingly, his advice is also Kafkaesque.
The fragments of his suggestions are very logical, but the conclusion is paradox. K. also points out Titorelli’s contradictions; Titorelli offers to use his connections to help K.’s case. He describes “three possible acquittals, actual acquittal, apparent acquittal, and protraction” (152). These possible solutions seem very logical, and Titorelli asks, “Have you noticed I sound almost like a lawyer?” (151). However, his conclusion is full of inconsistencies; K. refutes Titorelli’s advice. “I think you’re a contradiction yourself” (153).
Titorelli ridicules K.; “You don’t seem to have a general overview of the court yet” (150), and he also persuades K.; “We’re talking about two different things here, what the Law says, and what I’ve experienced personally” (153). Titorelli’s guidance is momentary and never helps K. escape from his guilt. Titorelli’s discourse clearly shows how the novel portrays outrageous images through existential detail. ”I must admit—I never saw a single actual acquittal” (153-154); If so, nothing matters, whether K. is innocent or guilty. Titorelli undoubtedly tells the nature of the trial; K.’s prosecution is not because of his guilt, but K. is guilty because of his prosecution.
Eventually, Titorelli informs him that there is no way to be acquitted at the end of the trial. “No file is ever lost, and the court never forgets” (158); “After all, it’s a merely formal matter” (161). These words of Titorelli’s make K. realize the futility of his efforts, and persuade him to give up. As is the same with the other helpers, Lawyer Huld, Uncle Karl, and the Tradesman Block, Titorelli cannot help K. escape from his trial. “But they also prevent an actual acquittal” (161). Titorelli’s practical advice is very honest, but leads to stir up K.’s sense of crisis.
“Judges on the lowest level, . . . don’t have the power to grant a final acquittal, that power resides only in the highest court, which is totally inaccessible to you and me and everyone else” (158). Consequently, Titorelli’s help becomes the fifth wheel in front of the untouchable Court. As a poor painter, his legal advice has a contradicting condition standing opposite the divine Law. Also, the fact that his position in the Court is hereditary can be represented as a fixed social irrationality.
The Trial resembles Titorelli’s gloomy identical paintings of the landscape of the heath that show repetition and invisible delicate variation. Titorelli shows his three paintings to K. and says, “a companion piece” or “a similar one” (163). However, K. never understands him; “but not the slightest difference could be seen between it and the first one” (163); “It was not merely similar; however, it was exactly the same landscape” (163). To Titorelli and K., the concepts of “companion,” “similar,” and “same” are totally different from each other.
This scene is similar to Kafka’s short story, In The Penal Colony, because there is a language barrier between the Officer, the Condemned Man, and the Soldier. The Condemned Man never understands the process of an execution and even his own sentence. The terror of the power and the Law that penetrate deep into K.’s ordinary life might be analyzed as different meanings between the “same” and the “different.” K’s everyday life is far apart from politics and the Law; however his average life now becomes the Law itself.
Arrests and lawsuits become his routine, and The Trial seems like such an academic research study. As the landlady Frau Grubach’s expression goes, “It seems like something scholarly . . . that I don’t understand, but that I don’t need to understand either” (23). The Trial shows that life is politics itself beyond an isolated individual desire, existential pain, and an anti-government political life.
The encounter with the priest in the cathedral right before K. is dragged to death, gives a religious implication, aside from the political involvement. The priest’s parable tells of a country man denied by the doorkeeper at an entrance to the Law until he dies, and finds out that this entrance was meant only for him. As the country man’s nihilistic death, K. accepts his fate without resistance in front of the invisible Law and the untouchable Court. As in the encounter with the priest, “But if he turned around he was caught, for then he would have confessed that he understood quite well, that he really was the person named, and that he was prepared to obey” (211).
K. is called when the priest cries out: “Josef K.!” (211), and he answers. K. obeys after wandering to seek out the exit and realizes the impossibility. Louis Althusser says in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses that Ideology interpellates individuals as Subjects; “the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of “constituting” concrete individuals as subjects” (Althusser 698).
Social animals, humans, are the same as small insects that can never escape from the tough spider webs called society. If humans are guilty from an existing status regardless of their responsibilities, human beings live in guilt until death outside of the peaceful Eden. The original sin tells us that humans are the presences who are suspended to the sentence of death. No one can find the exit against the fate of death. “How can any person in general be guilty? We’re all human after all, each and every one of us” (213); K.’s objection is the same question of The Trial. Strangely, the attitudes of K., embarrassment, absurdity, and a victimized feeling, are gradually changed. All he can do is choose his fate by his own free will, if he cannot avoid his fate in this unavoidable circumstance.
The priest says to K., “you don’t have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary” (223). This discourse has a duality that all visible phenomena are not all, but they are inevitable; everything is not true, but it is the only way it can happen. This duality can refer to the fact that human society is not as stable, orderly, transparent, and harmonious as it looks from the outside. The systematic figures of the surface are merely looks, and the inner truth is full of absurdity, hypocrisy, and irrationality. Law books are pornographic and the judges are secular figures who sit on kitchen chairs, not on thrones. The judges are described superficially as ordinary people who are slighted from the lower painter Titorelli; “Yes, the gentlemen are vain” (146).
Bürstner says, “I‘m fascinated with court matters. The court has a strange attraction, doesn‘t it?” (29). Leni also says that accused men are extremely attractive and the fact that they’ve been indicted, make them irresistible to her. Could Bürstner and Leni say that if they were in peril of their lives? What is K.’s legal charge? Such as the Condemned Man never knowing his own sentence in In the Penal Colony, this is never discussed here. The plot of this analogy to a judgment of guilt in the wrong way shows that society is not full of common sense. Then, who is the target of the trial? In the novel, K.’s case happens one morning, suddenly, without any rational reason.
This metaphoric sense shows that K.’s trial could have happened to anyone. It does not matter who. The object of the trial is everyone, and the crime is the ignorance of the Law and the claim of human innocence. Nevertheless, humans are born not by free will. This fact might be the reason why K. wanders over the maze of the invisible Law. K.’s guilt includes metaphysical implications and the Court is a conceptual court. The trial proceeds inside of his consciousness. The consciousness is gradually dominating all of his life. This analogy may lead to the fundamental question, where am I going? and where is the end? The sense of the original sin lies in the background of The Trial.
The priest says the countryman is more mature than the doorkeeper because he “after all came of his own free will” (221). The dreamer is freer than the person without dreams, and the person who puts it into practice is freer than the dreamer. Self awareness should not be restrained by society. Self-consciousness indicates a self-controlled ego despite social restrictions. The priest says to K., “First you must see who I am” (224) replying to K.’s despair, “I can’t find my way in the dark alone” (224).
No one directly answers how K. can find the way to prove his innocence. No one probably knows. The way to show his innocence is nowhere. Regarding the original sin, life and guilt is a different person of the same name. How much of this novel reflects human reality? The Trial often describes surreal and bizarre scenes through detailed descriptions of reality. The process of Josef K.’s trial seems to be a huge symbol beyond the satire and criticism of the justice system in Kafka’s era.
In terms of the symbolic idea, the appearance of the priest at the end is associated with a religious interpretation. Regarding Christianity, humans have original sin, but no one actually knows what the sin. Yet, humans tremble from fear that humans are under God’s judgment, and no one actually knows or has ever seen who God is, the judge. Thus, humans trick themselves into wild ideas to expiate their sin despite not knowing what their sins are.
Eventually, the result that returns to humans is only death. It is a nihilistic ending. Where is the untouchable judge, God? Where is the highest court that K. never reaches? Human’s fate is never known until the end of life and it is very close. It may be just “like a dog!” leaving only “shame” behind (231). As the court usher answers, “It’s the only way” (72) to the exit: the “exit” is death.