In his attempt to find a way out of this world, Joseph K. makes three mistakes that contribute to his tragic failure: his unquestioning acceptance of the case, his inability to decipher the shadowy rules of the Court, and his unwillingness to accept help from what he believes to be unreliable sources.
1. Accepting the Case
“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning” (1).
Joseph K.’s first mistake is to accept that there’s a case against him at all. He submits to the arrest with a mixture of docility and outrage, an attitude that will influence much of his behavior and thus contribute to his failure. He alternates between insulting the warders and Inspector, and attempting to appease them. The first interview ends with Joseph K. feeling both uneasy and triumphant: he’s still free, but for how long?
When he receives a call summoning him to a first interrogation, he goes readily, although he behaves with contempt towards the people gathered to hear his interrogation. The following week, he shows up without having been summoned, just in case.
Kafka thus illustrates a human tendency to submit to authority, even when that authority is dubious. Joseph K. doesn’t question the legitimacy of the case, the courts, or the law system that he has allegedly violated. And it’s important to remember that at no time during the novel does Joseph - or the reader - learn what he is accused of. However, this detail gradually loses importance as the story progresses - a fact that should provoke outrage in both characters and readers, but which ultimately fails to do so.
2. Unraveling the Rules
“The Court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and it dismisses you when you go” (222).
Once Joseph K. accepts his case, he is absorbed into the machinery of a system he can never hope to understand or manipulate. Finding himself in the disconcerting position of being “arrested but free,” he first sets about attempting to clear the mysterious charges brought against him. Later on, when he realizes this is impossible, he spends his remaining days trying to pushing his case through the courts. At this, too, he will fail.
The Courts of Law responsible for the endless cases against Joseph K. and countless others constitute a maze of incomprehensible rules and bureaucratic dead ends. Nothing is recorded, and all knowledge comes from “legendary accounts of ancient cases” (154). Neither lawyers nor their clients ever have access to case documents, and must therefore compose their pleas blindly, and submit them when the time seems right. Court officials have a very limited understanding of the cases they’re supposed to be working on; “consequently they could hardly ever quite follow in their further progress ... any particular case thus appeared in their circle of jurisdiction often without their knowing whence it came, and passed from it they knew not whither” (119). And the Courts themselves are housed in the attics of rundown tenements, in windowless offices whose stale air is so oppressive that anyone who enters loses the ability to think clearly.
Joseph’s decision to take an active approach in confronting this system is the second mistake of his fruitless journey. His visits to the Court attics are frustrated by his inability to obtain any information or to even find his way around without succumbing to the crushing, sunless atmosphere. He fails to find the offices in time for his first (unscheduled) interrogation, and finds all doors closed to his subsequent inquiries. Nevertheless, he keeps trying, and by the end of the novel he has dismissed his lawyer and taken the full load of the casework upon himself in spite of the lawyer’s advice to “lie low, no matter how much it went against the grain,” since “if someone took it upon himself to alter the disposition of things around him, he ran the risk of losing his footing and falling to destruction, while the organization would simply right itself by some compensating action in another part of its machinery ... and remain unchanged” (121). It is Joseph K.’s refusal to accept the nature of the system - that of a self-directing machine that stops for nobody - that renders him unable to play by its rules.
3. Finding Help
“[T]he lawyer’s methods ... amounted to this: that the client finally forgot the whole world and lived only in hope of toiling along this false path until the end of his case should come in sight” (193).
Joseph K. fails to accept not only his own role in his case, but also the roles of others. This is his third mistake, and possibly the one that will cost him his life.
The Courts operate on a warped perspective, where the people who should know most actually know the least, while it is the apparent outsiders who hold the key to understanding the workings of the Law. Therefore, it is not the lawyer who is most valuable, but rather his young maid Leni, who knows many of his clients intimately. The Judges are virtually useless, but the artist whom they commission to paint their portraits has a great deal of influence in the Courts.
Joseph realizes this from the beginning, when he meets the usher’s wife at the interrogation. However, he repeatedly rejects offers of help from these individuals, refusing to believe that their knowledge and influence surpass that of the Court officials and lawyers. In dismissing the lawyer, he also cuts his ties with Leni and Herr Block. Likewise, he runs from the painter Titorelli’s offer to secure a temporary acquittal for him, and ignores the warning from the mysterious priest - a prison chaplain - at the Cathedral.
Instead, Joseph K. decides to engage the Court officials by using his own bureaucratic skills; as Chief Clerk of a bank, he feels more than capable of negotiating his way out of his predicament. However, the end of the novel finds him isolated and helpless, desperate for even a glimpse of his neighbor Fräulein Bürstner, whose advice during the early stages of his case he had also rejected.
4. The End
The Trial ends with Joseph K.’s confusing, sad demise. His willingness to go to his own execution is disconcerting, since Kafka does not indicate what has happened between the encounter at the Cathedral, when Joseph still appears willing to fight for his acquittal, and this final night. Has Joseph given up, or is this a final act of free will? Does he make the ultimate submission to authority, or a deliberate choice to completely escape the system?
As he does with Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, Kafka places the protagonist of The Trial in a situation where he can either succumb to terrible circumstances or attempt to build a new life around them. Joseph, like Gregor, is more than willing to fight back for control of his life. However, his refusal to take into account the idiosyncratic rules and inhabitants of his new world ultimately leaves him isolated and forced to take the only way out left.
Work Cited
Kafka, Franz. The Trial. New York: Shocken Books, 1984.
