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It's worth noting that this book was unfinished. He only considered five of his books (according to his friend and literary executor, Max Brod) to have "counted" and asked for the rest to be burned when he died. Following Kafka's plan, there should have been many more stages of the trial developed before the end. Also, Brod arranged the order of the chapters to the best of his ability based on knowledge that he'd gleaned from Kafka during his lifetime. These factors may account for some of the gaps and disclarities in the novel rather better than its own surreal qualities do.I can only wish that I had the ability to read the finished novel, because this is a wonderful and complicated book. It's often made out to be a simple parable, but it's far from simple. K. is more than just an innocent man (you can even argue that his lifestyle marks him as more corrupt than we're given to know) and the process is more than all-powerful and unstoppable. The logic of the book is like a dream and has the same crazy sense-- people go in and out through doors that require them to cross beds, women fall in love with condemned men because of the air of doom-- it carries very well the idea of a machine that clearly has its own rules that the individual is not given to understand. Even with the limitations of its unfinished state, the Trial is still and important read.

Many people find The Trial to be baffling and absurd. Well, much of Kafka's writing IS absurd, because he was essentially an existentialist who considered life itself to be more or less devoid of absolute meaning. The Trial, contrary to what some readers think, IS basically allegorical. The protagonist's plight is an allegory of human alienation in the face of the absurdity of existence. Many reviewers on this page (usually high-school students, it seems) probably were hoping for a book with a plot as asinine as a "Friends" episode. Well, this is heavy reading and not for the faint of heart or weak of mind. You can't read Kafka as if it's surface-level, obvious, dumb-dumb writing. The protagonist struggles onward in the face of absurdity because this is what many of us do in real life. He did all he knew how to do, and he was so bound up in the machinery of his life and his bureaucratic nightmare that he couldn't deviate his path to a place of safety. This is a very important book, full of depth and meaning on many levels. Read it and figure out why. (Even if you have to use your brain).

Upon Kafka's rather premature death, his good friend Max Brod went to work riffling through the paperwork he had left behind. Amongst the many bits and pieces of his work (many was only bits and pieces- Kafka never thought his novels to be entirely complete), there was a letter written to Brod, instructing him to burn all of his work. In closer examination, Brod found an earlier draft of the letter, which instructed him to keep certain pieces, The Trial being one of them.Thank you, Mr. Max Brod, for disregarding the first draft of Franz Kafka's letter.The Trial is a profound documentation of a self-made man's descent into madness, brought about by a false accusal of an unknown deed. This descent is explored beautifully. As the book progesses, the events become increasingly nightmarish and surreal. We finish the book unsettled and fatigued, with more questions than answers. The adjective "Kafkaesque" trully has more meaning.The aspect I found most interesting was that K. is never given any defining characteristics- his actions often contradict each other, and many times he acts wholly irrationally. Coupled with the fact that his wrongdoing is never named, the reader automatically identifies with K. Anyone, you, me, your closest friend, could be K.Those who are "newbies" to Kafka: please consider tackling his short stories first- get a taste of Kafka before you devour him whole. Suggested reading would be "The Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony," "The Judgement," or "A Country Doctor." These short stories are quite enjoyable, and will answer the question as to whether you are trully hardy enough to be Kafka material.

"The Trial" ranks with Hana Arendt's study of Fascism as one of the emblematic texts of the Twentieth Century. Like Arendt, Kafka provides us with an illuminating view of the efficient evil of buraucracy.In the novel, Joseph K is an ordinary and unimportant office worker who is arrested and put on trial for a crime that is never identified. After his arrest, K is released and placed under surveillance until his trial. As he continuously encounters the aparatus of state, K realizes that his fate and his identity are entirely defined by someone else. Ultimately K is murdered by unidentified functionaries of the state. In his last concious moments he wonders if the movements of a bystander have any meaning at all. Is the person greeting him, expressing alarm at his fate, cheering the process, or doing something completely unrelated to his murder? Individuals and the legal aparatus in this book are not concerned with justice so much as process process. To anyone who finds this story too byzantine and confusing, just read a few pages of "The Gulag Archipelago" or read the account of a surviving political prisoner of any country. In most cases, the arrested person has no idea of his/her crime and is coersed into accepting a fate that bears no relation to his/her action. The individual in this case is not a human being but an inanimate unit controlled or disposed of by others.Kafka examined the peculiar Twentieth Century phenomenon of depersonalizing and disposing of a human being with no apparent justification. Where some writers have chronicled this from a political and historical perspective, Kafka examined it from a psychological one. He took us into the thoughts and fears of a prisoner of the state.

The Trial stands alone in its crude scope of the incomprehensible nightmares that lead the path of humanity. That same feeling of inaction and of being submerged in a grotesque labyrinth, so present in his short stories, explodes here with no mercy to its ill-fated protagonist K. Assaulted by the fact of being charged of an inextricable crime, K lives a nightmare of bureaucracy and psychological self mutilation while trying to understand the impossible. However, K himself is in no way different or innocent: he is as human as everyone of us...perhaps this was Kafka's point, advising that it is humanity which is punished by its own complex and intangible self machinery. Seldom has such a sour fable of inevitable downfall been so efficient and accurate. The novel is relatively short, but its content has by now transcended all frontiers due to its actuality; one can relate (with its obvious discrepancies) with the red taped chaos surrounding the characters. K embarks on individual episodes, from everyday office life to visiting the infernal and the vulgar, grotesque demi monde of the legal tribunals. In none of these places he is free of the impregnable burden unknown to all but the 'system'. The novel was never completed and surely Kafka would have enhanced his detail of that terrifying world; however, of what was left we obtained an obliged tale for any reader, and the living testimony that ranks Kafka with Joyce, Proust, Faulkner and Borges as fundamental story tellers of the 20th Century. (Put special emphasis on the chapter when K goes to the church. Here, Kafka develops his parable on justice and its ulterior unreachable nature. This chapter is sure to be one of the most intense prose ever written.)