The Trial is an extremely intriguing allegorical tragedy about the systematic jargon the legal system has become.

It starts off with the main character Josef K. a senior banker getting arrested with no reason on a regular morning, therefore to solve this he devolves into a cyclical adventure in the deep dark bureaucratic system. At first he very much believes in justice but then he gets indirectly told that if he wants to win, he has to take advantage of some loophole or some systematic error. This makes him perplexed and annoyed as he does not want to continue his trial. Lucky for him since he spoke up, the bureaucratic system has pronounced him guilty and asks for him to be executed. 

 

After reading this book, I very much started to ask questions that I have avoided in my life. Questions such as: Is such a jargonistic bureaucratic system really beneficial? Another interesting thing this book portrays is the courtroom. When we think of a courtroom we usually think of a grand institution with big marble pillars and officals with wigs etc. But this book flips the normalities on our head and shows us a different reality, a slummy, old dirty hall which is interchangeably for a home. It makes us continuously question this metaphor and how messed up our legal system is.  

 

Another interesting idea is a fable told by a church pastor called before the law, and to summarise it: A doorkeeper is standing before the law and a man comes up to him and asks to be admitted before the law. However the doorkeeper rejects him and tells him he can’t be admitted to the law yet. The man asks him if he can be admitted and the doorkeeper tells him the possibility but not now. Therefore the man sits and waits for his time to be admitted to the law. The man however does try everything in his power to get in, but sadly everything he tries always fails and he gets told to keep waiting. As the years go by the man grows frail and dies, but before he dies he asks the doorkeeper one question: ‘How come nobody has used this door?’, the doorkeeper replies: ‘The door was only meant for you and now I am going to close it.’

 

Many debate about what Kafka meant by such doorkeeper metaphor but from my personal observation, I believe that there are two meanings: The Legal System, and Religion. For the first point, I believe Kafka wrote this extract to firstly foreshadow Josef K's death but secondly I believe he is trying to force us to question: What really is justice? My second point, I believe Kafka was trying to show his viewpoint of atheism, by using the idea of being told that they can go in, but never really being let in.

 

In my personal opinion this book is a must read for those who want to find a new perspective to our world.