The Trial

“‘You can’t leave, you’re being held.’ ‘So it appears,’ said K. ‘But why?’ ‘We weren’t sent to tell you that. Go to your room and wait. Proceedings are under way and you’ll learn everything in due course.’”

K.’s ignorance of his crime becomes thematic over the course of the novel, and despite the warden’s claim that K. will “learn everything in due course,” neither K. nor the reader ever discovers the reason behind K.’s arrest and trial. Even at this early stage, nothing about K.’s situation makes much sense: K. is charged with a crime he did not commit and does not know of; he is arrested but permitted to go about his daily life; he is tried in a court located in the attic of an apartment building, and so on.

“Having received this message, K. hung up the phone without replying; he had resolved at once to go on Sunday; it was clearly necessary, the trial was getting under way and he had to put up a fight; this initial inquiry must also be the last.”

Throughout the novel, K. struggles with how he should respond to his trial, resolving at certain times (as here) to fight while being driven at other times to regard the whole situation as ridiculous and unimportant. The attitude of the court is similarly ambiguous, with different officials telling K. that his case is serious but that he should go about his life as usual. Here, similarly, K. is told to go to the court on Sunday for his initial inquiry, but he is not even told at what time he should arrive.

“What has happened to me is merely a single case and as such of no particular consequence, since I don’t take it very seriously, but it is typical of the proceedings being brought against so many people. I speak for them, not for myself.”

In his speech at his inquiry, K. presents himself as a kind of everyman and his situation as a universal one, “typical of the proceedings being brought against so many people.” Powerless as an individual, he seeks power in solidarity. In this context, the doorkeeper’s statement that “[t]his entrance was assigned only to you” feels especially bleak. The court’s power is rooted in this discrepancy: The court itself is faceless and impersonal, but its attention to K. (and each of its other victims) is highly personal and singular. He cannot know the court at all, but it knows him intimately.

“I just wanted to draw your attention to the fact […] that you have today deprived yourself—although you can’t have realized it—of the advantage that an interrogation offers to the arrested man in each case.”

As K. storms out of his inquiry, the examining magistrate cryptically suggests that his speech has done him harm somehow and that submitting to an “interrogation” would have helped his case. Other court officials, however, suggest that trials such as K.’s are foregone conclusions and that one can do very little to influence their outcomes. We might also wonder what information K. might have gleaned from an interrogation, given his ignorance of his crime and the court’s obvious reticence to share any information with him.

“But there’s no reason to feel hurt by that either, knowing that I’m not at all concerned about the outcome of the trial, and would only laugh at a conviction. Assuming the trial ever comes to an actual conclusion, which I greatly doubt.”

As throughout the novel, there is a tension between K.’s professed attitude toward his trial and his behavior. On the one hand, K.’s arrogance and feelings of superiority come across in his disgust for the trial and the court officials pursuing it. On the other hand, K. cannot help but try to fight against his situation, speaking against the corruption of the court and even coming to the court on days when he has not been summoned.

“Josef, […] you’ve undergone a total metamorphosis; you’ve always had such a keen grasp of things, has it deserted you now, of all times? Do you want to lose this trial? Do you know what that means? It means you’ll simply be crossed off. And that all your relatives will be drawn in, or at least dragged through the mud. Pull yourself together, Josef. Your indifference is driving me crazy. Looking at you almost makes me believe the old saying: ‘Trials like that are lost from the start.’”

The visit of K.’s uncle marks a turning point in K.’s attitude toward his trial, with the uncle chiding K. for his “indifference” and warning him that the fact that the trial is not taking place in the normal court makes it even more dangerous. Even before the uncle’s visit K. has shown signs of being more concerned with his case. But after his uncle visits and introduces him to the lawyer Huld, K. will stop pretending that the trial is not serious, and he will soon become constantly consumed by the trial and its outcome.

“The strange thing was that this judge wasn’t sitting in calm dignity, but instead had his left arm braced against the back and arm of the chair, while his right arm was completely free, his hand alone clutching the arm of the chair, as if he were about to spring up any moment in a violent and perhaps wrathful outburst to say something decisive or even pass judgment.”

The portrait of the judge, as K. will realize, is characteristic of how officials of his court are represented—that is, in dynamic motion, ready to pounce. K. sees a similar portrait in Titorelli’s apartment, with the addition of a winged figure representing both Justice and Victory. This iconography reveals a great deal about the court and its emphasis on defeating the defendant, often through the use of aggressive means, rather than on seeking truth or justice.

“After all, K. had no idea what action his lawyer was taking; in any case it wasn’t much […] In the first place, he scarcely asked any questions. And yet there was so much to ask. Questions were the main thing. K. had the feeling he could ask all the necessary questions on his own. His lawyer, on the other hand, instead of asking questions, did all the talking, or sat across from him in silence.”

The lawyer, Herr Huld, seems to behave no more rationally than the court, not even asking any questions to shed light on K.’s hopelessly obscure situation (K. still does not know anything about the charges brought against him). The lawyer’s behavior is one of several indications that what influences trials such as K.’s is not evidence or even the law but personal connections with lower officials of the court—and it is only these connections, as K. realizes, that make Huld useful to him.

“Just don’t attract attention! Keep calm, no matter how much it seems counter to good sense. Try to realize that this vast judicial organism remains, so to speak, in a state of eternal equilibrium, and that if you change something on your own where you are, you can cut the ground out from under your own feet and fall, while the vast organism easily compensates for the minor disturbance at some other spot—after all, everything is interconnected—and remains unchanged, if not, which is likely, even more resolute, more vigilant, more severe, more malicious.”

K. finds himself in an impossible and inscrutable position in relation to his trial, for while he is being instructed by people like the lawyer to avoid attracting attention and to “keep calm,” he must also remain constantly involved in his case. Increasingly, K. is being forced to play a bureaucratic game whose rules he does not know (and which nobody tells him), and the more the game unfolds the more he realizes that there is no escape, that the court conducting his trial is a “vast organism” whose power extends everywhere, and that “everything is interconnected.”

“If he had been alone in the world he could have easily disregarded the trial, although then the trial would surely never have occurred at all. But now his uncle had already taken him to the lawyer, and family considerations were involved; his job was no longer totally independent of the course of the trial, he himself had been incautious enough to mention the trial to a few acquaintances with a certain inexplicable feeling of self-satisfaction, others had heard about it in unknown ways, his relationship to Fräulein Bürstner seemed to fluctuate with the trial itself—in short, it was no longer a matter of accepting or rejecting the trial, he was in the midst of it and had to defend himself.”

As K. grows increasingly concerned about his trial, his situation becomes more and more surreal, and even K.’s reflections take a metaphysical turn: K. sees the trial as virtually a product of his own thoughts and actions, suggesting that by disregarding the trial he could have made it disappear but that in acknowledging its reality (by hiring a lawyer and discussing the trial with his family and acquaintances) he has made it real, and now has no choice but to defend himself. K. seems to believe that he originally could have chosen between accepting or rejecting the reality of the trial. Because he took it too seriously at the start, he is now “in the midst of it” and can no longer choose: He has made the trial real.

“In the Law, which I’ve never read, mind you, it says of course on the one hand that an innocent person is to be acquitted; on the other hand it does not say that judges can be influenced. My own experience, however, has been precisely the opposite. I know of no actual acquittals but know many instances of influence.”

The painter Titorelli contrasts the letter of the law with the way the law is practiced, explaining to K. that while an innocent person should in theory be acquitted, this is not at all how things work in his own experience. K. is thus increasingly faced with a court in which there is no reason, justice, or even law—only bureaucracy.

“Judges on the lowest level, and those are the only ones I know, 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.”

The reason trials can only be influenced through members of the lower court, as the painter Titorelli explains, is because the “highest court […] is totally inaccessible.” This information makes K.’s situation even more puzzling and disheartening, with his trial (and, ultimately, his life) in the hands of an irredeemably corrupt bureaucracy that effectively answers neither to any higher authority (the inaccessible “highest court”) nor to the society they serve.

“I don’t know who the great lawyers are, and it’s probably impossible to contact them. I don’t know of a single case in which they can be said with certainty to have intervened. They do defend some people, but it’s not possible to arrange that on one’s own, they only defend those they wish to defend. The cases they take on, however, have no doubt already advanced beyond the lower court. On the whole it’s best not to think about them, otherwise consultations with other lawyers, their advice and assistance, all seem so disgusting and useless that, as I myself know from experience, what you would like most to do would be to pitch the whole affair, go home to bed, and hear nothing more of it.”

Block provides K. with information on another obscure aspect of the court—the “great lawyers,” who are as inaccessible as the high officials and magistrates of the court. Great lawyers, like the high court and actual acquittals, are the stuff of legend, something that defendants like Block and K. can only dream about.

“I never had as many worries about the trial as I did from the moment you began to represent me. When I was on my own I did nothing about my case, but I hardly noticed it; now, on the other hand, I had someone representing me, everything was set so that something was supposed to happen, I kept waiting expectantly for you to take action, but nothing was done.”

K. explains that he only began to feel truly concerned about his trial when he hired Huld as his lawyer, a shift in attitude that he seems to regard as paradoxical. K. is especially disconcerted by the lawyer’s inactivity, which he takes as a sign that his trial is not progressing. K. clearly does not want to worry about his trial, and everything he does is directed at the goal of going on with his life as though the trial did not exist—a goal that K. is unable to accomplish no matter what he does.

“I once read an essay in which I found the difference between representing a normal case and representing one of this sort expressed quite beautifully. It said: one lawyer leads his client by a slender thread to the judgment, but the other lifts his client onto his shoulders and carries him to the judgment and beyond, without ever setting him down.”

There are increasing references in the later parts of the novel to the body of text dealing with the mysterious court of The Trial—a court that is explicitly differentiated, here as elsewhere, from the “normal” court. In this passage, Huld cryptically describes two different approaches to the lawyer’s role. In both metaphors, “the judgment” is absolute and unchanging. The lawyer’s job is to guide or carry the client to this inevitable conclusion—not to alter it.

“He was no longer a client, he was the lawyer’s dog. If the lawyer had ordered him to crawl under the bed, as into a kennel, and bark, he would have done so gladly.”

K. is horrified and disgusted as he witnesses the interaction between Block and the lawyer, realizing that Block is behaving like “the lawyer’s dog.” As much as K. recoils at the scene, he cannot escape this fate, for in dying he too will become “like a dog!”

“‘Do you realize your trial is going badly?’ asked the priest. ‘It seems that way to me too,’ said K. ‘I’ve tried as hard as I can, but without any success so far. Of course I haven’t completed my petition yet.’ ‘How do you imagine it will end,’ asked the priest. ‘At first I thought it would surely end well,’ said K., ‘now sometimes I even have doubts myself. I don’t know how it will end. Do you?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘but I fear it will end badly. They think you’re guilty. Your trial may never move beyond the lower courts. At least for the moment, your guilt is assumed proved.’ ‘But I’m not guilty,’ said K. ‘It’s a mistake. How can any person in general be guilty? We’re all human after all, each and every one of us.’”

With the priest, K. finds that he is able for the first time to speak straightforwardly and candidly about his case. He admits that he has doubts about how his case will end, and the priest tells him frankly that he fears “it will end badly” and that his “guilt is assumed proved.” The relationship between judgment and knowledge again comes to the fore: K. still does not know what he is accused of, and so has no way of knowing how his case is progressing.

“‘Everyone strives to reach the Law,’ says the man, ‘how does it happen, then, that in all these years no one but me has requested admittance.’ The doorkeeper sees that the man is nearing his end, and in order to reach his failing hearing, he roars at him: ‘No one else could gain admittance here, because this entrance was meant solely for you. I’m going to go and shut it now.’”

The priest tells the parable of the doorkeeper to make a point about deception—a point that is not made entirely clear by the end of the parable, in which the doorkeeper reveals to the man that the entrance to the Law, which he has denied him his whole life, was in fact meant for him alone. But is the man or the doorkeeper deceived? And who is the deceiver? K. debates such questions with the priests as he tries to understand how the parable can illuminate his own experience.

“‘You don’t have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary.’ ‘A depressing opinion,’ said K. ‘Lies are made into a universal system.’”

K.’s preoccupation with his innocence is one system of his belief—which the priest exposes as misguided—that the truth should be the chief concern of the Law. But truth does not matter, says the priest—what matters is necessity, a view that K. disavows because it makes lies, rather than truth, into a universal.

“Why should I want something from you. The court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.”

K. is initially surprised by the apparent indifference of the priest, who seemed unusually friendly to him. The court, as the priest explains, “wants nothing” from K., leading to further reflection on the strange nature of K.’s trial, whose pace seems to be governed above all by the time and effort K. puts into it.

“But the hands of one man were right at K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing sight K. saw how the men drew near his face, leaning cheek-to-cheek to observe the verdict. ‘Like a dog!’ he said; it seemed as though the shame was to outlive him.”

K., who had tried so hard throughout the novel to avoid the animalistic fate of so many of those involved in the court, finds himself dying in the “like a dog!” K. finds as he dies that there was no escape from his case after all, and even in dying he cannot escape the indignity that the trial forced him to suffer in life.

“He could do as he wished, but he should bear in mind that the high court could not permit itself to be mocked.”

This Fragment evidently takes place at an earlier stage in K.’s trial, when he still feels relatively unafraid to ignore the court. The warning that the “high court could not permit itself to be mocked” is thus an apt warning, and one that K. is foolish to disregard.

“He scarcely thought about the court at all; when it did come to mind, however, it seemed to him as if there must be some grip, hidden of course one would have feel about in the dark, by means of which this huge and totally obscure organization could easily be seized, pulled up, and destroyed.”

Even as K. realizes the vast reach of the court, he clings to the hope that there is some way to beat them. This fragment probably also belongs to an early and thus more hopeful stage of the novel, before K. realizes that the court is not to be trifled with, that even fighting the court is a kind of defeat, and that beating the court—much less destroying it—is all but impossible.