To begin with, Kafka’s The Trial appears to be a simple story. In the opening chapter, Joseph K., a bank manager in his 20s in some central European city, is arrested for an unknown reason by authorities whose jurisdiction he doesn’t recognise. “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without doing anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” In the course of the novel, K. solicits help and advice from his associates, but their advice is worthless or untrustworthy, and everything he learns about the court and the legal system he has to deal with indicates the law is an ass; the court is strict, arbitrary, senseless and merciless. In any case he can’t understand the nightmare of legal practice. Finally, driven to the wall, Joseph K. is killed by the side of the road, anonymously, and to all appearances, meaninglessly. This, in brief, is the story line.

But no European story is ever told as if it is the only one. It is always a philosophy expressed in images and metaphors; and in a classic the philosophy has disappeared into the images. For Joseph K., (as for all Kafka’s novels) the “process” (in German, the novel is called Der Prozess that has been translated as The Trial) of investigation for an alleged crime that is unknown, its judgment and the guilt takes place as much within the mind as i t does with the protagonist and the authorities.

Not knowing why he has been roped in, Joseph K. becomes painfully self-conscious as he tries to figure out what will work with the authorities to let him off the hook. K. justifies himself for running from pillar to post with that “old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they might be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.”

But he doesn’t know who the authorities are, or, for that matter, what his guilt is. So, he turns the light within himself. He analyses all his actions and tries to work out what will work and whether he can justify his life to himself and in the process try to figure out what is true or real and hence what his guilt could possibly be.

As he analyses, questions arise thick and fast, often not necessarily in a logical manner. What do I do? Do I laugh and cry? Is the legal system ridiculous or cruel, inhuman or only too evidently human? Am I to think there can’t be any possible outcome except execution? Can this really be the world I live in?

Perhaps the key to understanding The Trial (which has been subject to so many different interpretations) comes near the end of the novel where K., in the cathedral, looks up towards the priest with a sudden infusion of hope that per haps he would have answers to the dilemma of being caught for reasons unknown.

“If the man would only quit the pulpit, it is not impossible that K. could obtain decisive and acceptable counsel from him which might, for instance, point the way, not toward some influential manipulation of the case, but toward a circumvention of it, a breaking away from it altogether, a mode of living completely outside the jurisdiction of the Court. This possibility must exist, K. of late had given much thought to it.”

The key phrase is “the jurisdiction of the Court”. But what is the Court? Is it the court of justice in the literal sense, as it is often taken to mean, or is it the family, or the town that is insane; or is it the whole of the 20th century or life itself? Hence the question: How to devise a mode of living completely outside the jurisdiction of the Court when the Court is of one’s own devising? And, what if the man in the pulpit turns out to be oneself? K. lives in a labyrinth world where the priest is within oneself and the individual must recognise it as such. So, K. says on two occasions: “You may object that it is not a trial at all; you are quite right, for it is only a trial if I recognise it as such.” And he drives home the point in the Cathedral: “But I am not guilty; it’s a misunderstanding. And if it comes to that, how can any man be called guilty?”

The Trial is nonsensical by rational standards. This is Kafka’s way of saying that reason is not enough to understand the ways of the world or the workings of the human mind. Man is more irrational than rational and quite often i t is the irrational that wins out in the end. Kafka is a good example of the way some novelists intuitively see patterns and movements in the world that others do not see. Such insights contribute to the lasting fascination their work arouses in generations of readers. The Trial should be read not only through the lens of the Holocaust (did he, as a Jew, see it coming?) and the arbitrary legal systems that make lives of the ordinary individuals like K. miserable. Such things happen ev erywhere; the details may be different but the experience is the same. Hence the nightmare of reason.

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