TRIAL BY FRANZ KAFKA

An Analytical Study

Abstract

Franz Kafka was a prominent literary figure in the 20th-century of European literature. Franz Kafka has been called everything from a modernist to an existentialist, a fantasy writer to a realist. His work almost stands alone as its own subgenre, and the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ – whose meaning, like the meaning of Kafka’s work, is hard to pin down, has become well-known even to people who have never read a word of Kafka’s writing. Perhaps inevitably, he is often misinterpreted as being a gloomy and humorless writer about nightmarish scenarios, when this at best conveys only part of what he is about. He was brought up in a middle-class German family. He wrote many novels on different themes. “The trial” is one of them. It was written in 1914 and was published posthumously in 1925 in the German language. It was translated into English by Willa and Edwin Muir in 1937. It is his best-known work. It is the story of Joseph K, a respectable bank officer, who is arrested by an inaccessible authority although he has done nothing wrong. One year later, two warders again come for K. they take him to a quarry outside of town and kill him in the name of the law. Through the struggle of that specific character, he criticized the modern bureaucracy. It is also described as an existentialist novel because it represents the absurdity of the world and the nightmare of intersubjectivity. In this article above mentioned themes are discussed with proper references.