44 pages • 1 hour read
Franz KafkaThe Trial
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1925A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Air
Air—and airlessness—is an important symbol throughout the novel. The court and its offices are characterized from early on by stuffiness or a lack of air. The apartment where K.’s initial inquiry is held, for example, is crowded and musty. The attic of the apartment building that houses the court offices is also stuffy and airless, and the poor air quality soon causes K. to collapse and feel “seasick” (78). When K. goes to see the painter Titorelli, he finds once again that “the air [is] oppressive” (140), and is hardly surprised when he finds more court offices behind the painter’s back door. The poor air quality of the spaces connected with the court becomes an evocative symbol: The trial is both literally and figuratively suffocating for K.—until the very end of the novel, when the trial resolves itself in the more permanent airlessness of death.
The Body
The body features prominently in the novel. Hands are especially prominent, for instance in the emphasis on the webbed fingers of Leni’s small hands, in Public Prosecutor Hasterer’s “strong, hairy hand” (245) in Fragment 2, in the way Block strokes his lawyer’s hands, or in the hands of the two warders who lead K. to his death at the end of the novel. The symbolism of hands evokes legal Latin, in which the word for legal authority over another is manus, meaning “hand” (the sense, apparently, being that one entity is “in the hands of” another). But other body parts are emphasized too. The portraits of the painter Titorelli emphasize the physicality of the officials of the court, invariably showing them poised to leap up. The superstition that the outcome of a trial can be predicted “from the face of the defendant, and in particular from the lines of his lips” (175) is another instance of the novel’s emphasis on the body. Finally, the court strips the bodies of its victims when punishing them, as seen when the flogger beats the warders or in the execution of K. himself.
Animal Imagery
Animal imagery is another major motif in the novel, often closely connected with the novel’s emphasis on the body. Many of the characters peopling the novel have animal attributes or behave like animals. The law student “snap[s] at [K.’s hand] with his teeth” (64) while carrying the usher’s wife away for the magistrate; Leni’s webbed hand is described by K. as “a pretty claw” (108); the figure of justice in Titorelli’s painting is winged; lawyers approach the court with “almost canine servility” (177); Rudi Block behaves like “the lawyer’s dog” (195). K.’s fight against the court thus becomes a fight to retain his humanity and to escape the indignity of becoming an animal. If this is the case, then K. ultimately fails, a failure encapsulated in the words he speaks as he dies: “Like a dog!” (131).
Related Titles
By Franz Kafka
