The Trial was written in 1914, but it’s about today.
(Written by Franz Kafka, Translated into English by Breon Mitchell.)
Josef K., the protagonist, is arrested by two men in his own home. They say he’s been accused of a crime but they won’t say what it is. A detective shows up but he won’t say either. The officers and the detective all work for an undisclosed organization. By the end of it, they don’t even take him into custody, and he’s free to go until they subpoena him.
Does any of that make sense? If it doesn’t, then you’re correct. It's the point; Kafka drills this same idea into his audience’s head over and over and over.
Which is my main critique: it goes on for too long. This is maybe the only novella I’ve read that feels long. I say “feels” because, despite only being 227 pages long (with largish lettering), Kafka’s story goes on and on while making the same point. I like satire, especially a satire of bureaucracy, but this one is indulgent.
I wouldn’t exactly call it repetitive, though. Most of the characters he meets are distinct and each give K. a new angle of what he’s up against. His neighbors, the painter, the lawyer, Leni, the merchant, his uncle, and the priest.
Perhaps the exhausting read plays into the story; the reader shares in the feelings K. experiences throughout the story. When K. learns something about the trial, it’s one step forward and two steps back. Or sometimes no steps forward. The undisclosed organization I mentioned earlier is revealed to be “the court,” a judiciary run by judges no one ever sees.
Put simply, when K. “learns” something, he learns nothing.
As with K., we as an audience are left frustrated by the lack of answers, but I believe Kafka designed it so that people might laugh. Not a hearty, joyous laugh, but an exasperated, tired-of-this-shitty-world type of laugh.
There is a terrifying aspect to this novel. K.’s journey for answers, although ultimately fruitless, takes some jarring twists and turns. My personal favorites—despite how mortifying—are when certain things are revealed to be part of the court. K. visits a strange painter who lives in a rundown apartment with nosy teenage girls who peek from outside his door. Later on, the painter reveals his attic room is part of the court and that the nosy girls outside are part of the court too. That exponentially increased the scale of “the court” in my mind. Its location could be anywhere, and its agents could be anyone. Kinda reminded me of The Matrix when I first read that scene.
Another scene I liked: after K. realizes his lawyer is useless and he'd have a better chance of representing himself in court, he goes to fire the lawyer. When he confronts the lawyer, he says "...nothing new really ever happens" (187). What's funny to me is how there's a growing amount of people online who survey the American political & cultural landscape and come to this exact conclusion. (Hantavirus? Over. Epstein? Stop talking about it. Another war in the Middle East? Abso-fucking-lutely. I can go on.) What's even more funny is that the character saying this is one of the big reasons nothing new ever happens. The characters who likely could make a difference only express their frustrations as opposed to doing anything, which perpetuates the problem.
Again, K. “learns” things about the court, but usually the new knowledge increases the scope. Usually, mystery in stories is about obscurity; there’s a piece missing in the jigsaw puzzle. What I find genius about Kafka is that he actually creates mystery by adding more information; the story is a jigsaw puzzle with no corner or edge pieces.
The judicial system Kafka describes, albeit vaguely, runs on flattery more than justice. No case law is ever reviewed, and no one is ever acquitted. Constant retrials, bribery, police that don’t identify themselves, no probable cause—does this sound familiar?
The best chapter of this book is the penultimate one, where K. is lured to a cathedral where he is confronted by a “priest” who later reveals he works for the court. Although the information he gives K. is similarly pointless, it gives us as an audience the clearest view of what the story is all about. The priest tells K. a simple parable used by the court: a farmer wants to go past a door to reach “the Law,” the doorkeeper will not let him, and the farmer dies before he can find a way through. That’s basically it. And the parable is a shortened version of the entire book up to this point. There’s only two things the doorkeeper tells the farmer: 1.) you cannot go through the door right now, and 2.) the door is meant only for you.
That stuck with me. You cannot go through the door right now. But the door is meant for you. What the hell.
I think why this book hits so hard for me is because I’ve lived it. I’ve been the farmer; trying to figure out how to navigate these infuriating corporate and government systems without paying a price. And I’ve been the doorkeeper; trying to explain the details to people without knowing what’s going on behind the curtain myself. Every character that works for or closely to the court has information, but most of the actual information is obscured.
Take any corporate job you’ve worked, or your last visit to the DMV, or a phone call with the customer service—you’ve lived The Trial.
I wonder if maybe Kafka would have been better off turning this novella into a short story, maybe based on that second-to-last chapter. I was hoping for some kind of fable or lesson by the end of the tale; I predicted that K. would get so frustrated he would actually commit a crime. Because that’s what the story is, this poor dude getting ragebaited at every turn. As well as us as an audience—I wanted to punch this book at times. I’m not sure this is a critique so much as a warning to readers, but The Trial doesn’t offer any solutions. This is a satire, not a fable. While I commend Kafka for sticking to his guns, all I could do was sigh at the ending.
What’s funny is that I really like this book and this author. It’s just hard to get excited about something so depressing.
Franz Kafka’s The Trial gives readers something to chew on. It can start but I wouldn’t say it’s profound, or all that productive. Mainly, I don’t think it justifies its own length. I more or less got the gist from the first two chapters. Other than that, this is a great book. This satire about bureaucratic institutions and employees has proven, unfortunately, timeless. I wish this wasn’t our reality, but after more than a hundred years since this novella, society has vindicated Kafka, now more than ever.
I’ll compress my review into three words: prescient but overdone.
4/5
by Anthony
7/21/2026