From the Outside Looking In

An examination of the life of Franz Kafka and his novel The Trial

The more I reflect on The Trial and on the life of who Franz Kakfa was as a man... the more I like the story. It is a work of genius in terms of its allegorical nature and the uniqueness of its concept, but it wasn’t fleshed out as well as it could have been. I don’t necessarily think editing would have fixed it. He began writing The Trial 11 years prior to his death (around the age of 30-31) the same age as Joseph K. I think Franz Kafka was a brilliant and deeply disturbed man, and I think the reason why he didn’t want his works published is because he couldn’t “solve” the answer to them. His characters always feel like they are on the outside looking in on life, just like him. Franz Kafka has a very authoritarian father who abused him and made him feel weak, afraid, and inadequate. His father represents the bureaucratic system that he can’t escape.

I read The Trial as a man, who upon his transition into his 30s, has finally felt the full weight of time and reality strike him that he is “a man” now. What does that mean? Who is his example? His father? Joseph K’s uncle? The lawyer? Painter? Priest? The bureaucracy is exponentially expansive and the more you try to make sense of it, the more frustrated and hopeless things become. Kafka’s brilliance is pointing out the absurdness of the modern world, much like other brilliant writers of the absurdity of life in the 20^th century. He had an understanding of the absurdity, but didn’t have the courage to overcome it. Though the system is absurd, it really wouldn’t have bothered him that much if he didn’t pay it any mind back. In the beginning he mentions that when he carried along with his life as if the trial didn’t matter, then his life was basically the same, but when he began talking to the lawyer and proceeding with council, aka giving the claims of guilt some sense of legitimacy, then his life unraveled. It’s kind of like the example of how to ski through the woods. If you focus on the path ahead, you will be fine, but if you try to “dodge” the trees, you will surely hit them. Your life is what you focus on.

Joseph K needed assurance of the answers of life. He needed to know the law. He could not accept the contradictions or paradoxes of life and the law. At the end, the gatekeeper never prevented him from walking through the door, he only said that there were more doors with loftier gatekeepers that awaited, and didn’t recommend walking through. I think there are many ways to interpret that, so I don’t think there’s only one answer, but I think the general point of The Trail, and what Kakfa was wrestling with in his own life, was the desire to find faith, and yet only having evidence and experience of a world and treatment that demanded obedience, competence, success, results, manliness, and perfection, all of which were alien to him. When what you seek is also what feels most alien to you, then your highest aim (your highest aim IS what judges you in life) can be none other than the elusive law that is protected by every absurd representative of it that he encounters in the world. What he needs is faith and patience. Take these two quotes of his.

“There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.”

“The original sin, the ancient wrong committed by man, consists in the complaint, which man makes and never ceases making, that a wrong has been done to him”.

Kafka intellectually understood what was at the heart of his despair but couldn’t find a resting place outside of it. There’s a really insightful letter Kafka wrote to his father that to me really shows the person heart of The Trial for him as an individual. I will conclude my post with this quote from that letter.

“There is only one episode in the early years of which I have a direct memory. You may remember it, too. One night I kept on whimpering for water, not, I am certain, because I was thirsty, but probably partly to be annoying, partly to amuse myself. After several vigorous threats had failed to have any effect, you took me out of bed, carried me out onto the pavlatche, and left me there alone for a while in my nightshirt, outside the shut door. I am not going to say that this was wrong—perhaps there was really no other way of getting peace and quiet that night—but I mention it as typical of your methods of bringing up a child and their effect on me. I dare say I was quite obedient afterward at that period, but it did me inner harm. What was for me a matter of course, that senseless asking for water, and then the extraordinary terror of being carried outside were two things that I, my nature being what it was, could never properly connect with each other. Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the pavlatche, and that consequently I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned.”