The Trial (German: Der Process, later Der Prozess) is a novel written by Franz Kafka between 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka's other novels, The ...
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The Trial (German: Der Process, later Der Prozess) is a novel written by Franz Kafka between 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka's other novels, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter which appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending. After Kafka's death in 1924 his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. The first English-language translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937. In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century. (wikipedia.org)
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Joseph K. is an average man. He's actually quite boring - most of his time is spent at the bank where he works, where he dreams of future promotions.
Imagine his surprise, when one morning, he is arrested in his apartment! The men who've come for him don't know what he's done, but no one else does either. He's arrested, but he gets to keep going to work and going about his regular business. Its all very strange.
As he learns more about the strange workings of the courts, he realizes he's in more trouble than he'd thought. Everybody seems to be a part of the court, but nobody knows how the courts work. And certainly, no one knows what he's been arrested for, or how he can help himself. Unfortunately, he's already been assumed as guilty by the court, leaving his attempts quite futile.
