The Trial

“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.”

The famous first sentence of Franz Kafka’s novel establishes the central themes of the story, highlighting the juxtaposition between K.’s innocence and his arrest. This juxtaposition continues to run throughout the novel, which becomes increasingly surreal as K. navigates an inscrutable bureaucracy to fight the case in which he is embroiled, never actually discovering what crime he has been accused of committing.

“‘You can’t leave, you’re being held.’ ‘So it appears,’ said K. ‘But why?’ ‘We weren’t sent to tell you that. Go to your room and wait. Proceedings are under way and you’ll learn everything in due course.’”

K.’s ignorance of his crime becomes thematic over the course of the novel, and despite the warden’s claim that K. will “learn everything in due course,” neither K. nor the reader ever discovers the reason behind K.’s arrest and trial. Even at this early stage, nothing about K.’s situation makes much sense: K. is charged with a crime he did not commit and does not know of; he is arrested but permitted to go about his daily life; he is tried in a court located in the attic of an apartment building, and so on.

“Having received this message, K. hung up the phone without replying; he had resolved at once to go on Sunday; it was clearly necessary, the trial was getting under way and he had to put up a fight; this initial inquiry must also be the last.”

Throughout the novel, K. struggles with how he should respond to his trial, resolving at certain times (as here) to fight while being driven at other times to regard the whole situation as ridiculous and unimportant.