Kafka's The Trial

The Trial was the only novel Kafka more-or-less completed during his own lifetime. Most of his other work is renowned for being fragmentary and incomplete. But even so, its chapters were kept in separate folders and he gave no indication of the order in which they were to appear. The parts were assembled and published by his friend Max Brod in 1925, the year after Kafka's death. It is a novel which seems to give early expression to the horrors of the modern world. It deals with the arbitrary nature of power threatening the freedom of the individual and crushing of every attempt to understand its workings. The novel opens with a sentence which has become famous - heralding the nightmare to come: "Somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for one morning without having done anything wrong, he was arrested." This is the 'knock on the door' which was to become an everyday experience for millions in the years that followed ... Read more >>

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