Franz Kafka

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Metamorphosis and Other Stories

July 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Franz Kafka is one of the most original and idiosyncratic writers of the twentieth century. He published very little during his own lifetime; he lived for literature (in fact he said “I am literature”); he wasn’t formally a great novelist or writer of short stories; and yet he put his stamp on literature to such an extent that his name has become an adjective – and we now speak of Kafkaesque situations and circumstances.

These tend to be scenarios in which the individual is trapped in madly contradictory situations, confronted by bureaucratic and totalitarian forces over which he has no control. That’s why Kafka’s reputation soared in the 1930s and 1940s. He prophesied the sort of state which condemned individuals as guilty – but didn’t tell them of what they were being accused. He spelled out the mad logic of the show trials long before they took place, and he is quite rightly regarded as a precursor of modern existentialism..

Metamorphosis is a superb piece of imaginative fiction. A young commercial salesman wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into giant insect. He is horrified – and so is his family, who shun him, neglect him, and eventually kill him. The tale admits to several levels of interpretation, and like most pieces of rich fiction it is dense with contextual symbols, metaphors, and suggestive allusions.

This collection also includes three other major short works – The Judgement, In the Penal Colony, and Letter to his Father. The first was written in a single creative burst during one night and concerns an Oedipal conflict between father and son which ends with the father condemning the son to death. The second is a horrifying account of someone undergoing torture in a way which prophecies what was to happen in the concentration camps (of both Russia and Germany) only a few years later. The famous letter to his father (which was never posted) is yet another a soul-searching psychological investigation of the relation between father and son. And for those who have not come across the lighter side of his writing, there’s also a collection of his first-ever published works – fragmentary pieces, to which he gives the title ‘Meditations’.

I was glad to see that in his introduction, Ritchie Robertson mentioned Nadine Gordimer’s magnificent short story Letter to his Son, which presents his father Herman Kafka’s hypothetical response to his neurotic son’s letter from beyond the grave. It’s a marvellous presentation of the other side of the picture.

The translation notes make very pertinent reference to the difficulty of rendering Kafka’s extraordinarily complex syntax. His writing is an odd mixture of startlingly dramatic images or situations, surrounded by endlessly convoluted descriptions and speculations, with deeply nested conditional clauses that can lead on from one page to the next in huge Teutonic paragraphs.

These new editions from OUP offer full value in terms of critical apparatus surrounding the text. There’s a lengthy introduction, a chronology of Kafka’s life, an essay on the new translation, explanatory notes, and an extended bibliography. This volume is an ideal starting point for anyone who has not read Kafka before.

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Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.146, ISBN 0199238553

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The Castle

August 10, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Kafka’s last major work

The Castle was Kafka’s last novel, and like most of his others (except The Trial) it was never completed. Indeed, it ends abruptly, breaking off half way through a sentence. But it towers like some sort of an unfinished masterpiece over the rest of his work. Anthea Ball, the translator of this new edition from OUP, makes the case that The Castle is unlike The Trial because it is set in the countryside and it is mainly concerned with a village community. This is what might be called a ‘charitable’ interpretation.

Others are likely to note that it has a very similar protagonist, with the same initial name (K) who seeks acceptance into the village and is condemned to failure in his attempts to gain admission to the Castle. This building dominates the entire locality and houses swarms of unseen officials and various bureaucrats representing authority in the absence of its real owner, who never appears.

The castle is also likened to a church or cathedral – and the villagers do in fact pay it religious devotions. Visitors to Kafka’s home town of Prague do not have to look far to see the likely origin of this powerful symbol. Prague Castle towers above every possible view from the surrounding city.

The villagers live in a state of what Marx called ‘rural idiocy’ because of their reverence for this unseen authority. Kafka’s other works are mainly set in a city – and he himself rarely left Prague where he was born, went to school and university, and worked – until the very end of his short life. But The Castle is world of shabby, overworked and undernourished peasants who live in hovels and endure brutish behaviour from everyone above them in the pecking order.

K does his best to challenge in a rational manner the benighted obeisance in which the villagers are held because of their irrational respect for the Castle’s authority – especially in the form of Klamm, an official of such awesome power that people are even afraid to say his name or look at him. But K is met with ambiguity, contradiction, and absurdity at every attempt to deal with the strange world in which he finds himself.

There is also the usual sexual ambiguity one comes to expect in Kafka’s work. When K arrives in the village, Frieda the barmaid is Klamm’s mistress, but she gives him up in favour of the newcomer K. The two of them consummate their passion on the floor of the bar room amongst beer puddles, unknowingly observed by the comic twins Artur and Jeremiah. This experience transports K into ‘another land’ – and yet he quickly gets fed up with her and spends all his time thinking about gaining access to the Castle.

Any number of possible interpretations of the novel have been discussed at length in the critical writing on Kafka. It has often been seen as a novel-length version of his parable ‘Before the Law’ in which a man seeks entry to the Law but is denied by a gatekeeper. The man decides to wait and only when he is dying asks why no other people have ever sought entrance. The gatekeeper replies “This entrance was assigned only to you. And now I am going to close it”.

The Castle is not for readers new to Kafka. Better to start with the short stories, such as Metamorphosis or his shorter novel The Trial. But for anything like a complete Kafka experience, this one is unmissable. It is also a surprisingly funny novel at times, despite its sombre overtones.

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Franz Kafka, The Castle, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.279, ISBN 0199238286

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The Man who Disappeared (Amerika)

May 8, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, commentary, study notes, reading

The Man who Disappeared (1913) (also known as Amerika) was Kafka’s first attempt at a novel, and like most of his others, with the exception of The Trial, it was left unfinished. He began writing it (for the second time) in 1912, then broke off to compose Metamorphosis and apart from producing a couple of subsequent fragments he never returned to it. Only the much anthologised first chapter, The Stoker was published in Kafka’s lifetime, in a collection of modernist texts edited by Kurt Wolf in 1913.

Readers expecting the usual Kafkaesque elements of existential terror and bureaucratic nightmares will be surprised and maybe delighted to discover that the story is a light-hearted and at times quite amusing fantasy of a young German boy at large in the USA.

Needless to say, Kafka had never been anywhere near America, and his account of it is entirely constructed from clichés of the New World – skyscrapers, non-stop traffic, and at times some Keystone Cops chase scenes.

The Man who Disappeared – commentary

The novel is an ironic reversal of the rags to riches story that is normally attached to immigration from the Old World to the New. Karl Rossman manages to go from riches to rags. He starts off with a wealthy and powerful uncle who showers him with luxury, but by the end of the narrative he has nothing, he is searching for work, and he is mixing with criminals and a prostitute. It is worth noting that Karl is not exactly an innocent abroad. He has been expelled from his family home following a sexual dalliance with an older servant woman that resulted in her bearing a child. So although he is only seventeen (or even fifteen) years old, Karl is in fact himself a father.

Authority figures

The authority figures in each chapter appear in pairs. When Karl becomes involved in the defence of the stoker and his claims of ill-treatment, it is to the ship’s Captain and the ship’s Purser that he is answerable and who challenge his actions and question his motivation.

His uncle Edward’s business associates are Mr Pollunder and Mr Green, both of whom have power over Karl. It is the invitation from Pollunder which displeases Karl’s uncle, and Mr Green who carries the letter which contains the orders of dismissal that expel Karl from his newfound paradise in New York.

He immediately falls into the hands of Robinson and Delamarche, who take advantage of his naivete and bully him into becoming virtually their servant. Interesting to note also that these authority figures are usually slightly different – of what we might now call the ‘good cop, bad cop’ kind. One of them will pretend to befriend Karl, the other will resort to naked threats. Karl tries to resist them both, but fails.

When he is disciplined for a minor infraction of discipline at the Hotel Occidental, it is the Head Waiter and Head Porter who perform this same dual function

Women

The women in the story are either all-embracing mother figures, sexual predators, or vulnerable waifs.

Grete Mitzelbach offers Karl somewhere to sleep when he is in need; she secures him a job; and she offers her support when he is being threatened with dismissal at the hotel. In fact she also recommends him to another employer.

On the other hand Johanna Brummer, the thirty-five year old servant woman who seduces the fifteen (or seventeen) year old Karl does so in a comically grotesque manner – but one which Karl finds ‘disgusting’. Klara, Mr Pullender’s daughter, appears to be a a more sympathetic figure, but she ends up attacking Karl physically, then invites him to her room – but only to reveal her sexual connection with Mr Mack, the millionaire’s son.

Delamarche’s mistress Brunelda is almost a grotesque parody of a sluttish courtesan:

Her red dress was rucked up at the front and a long stretch of it hung down to the floor, her legs were visible almost to the knees, she was wearing thick white woollen stockings, and had no shoes on.’How hot it is, Delamarche,’ she said, turning her face from the wall and holding her hand negligently in front of Delamarche, who seized and kissed it.

Terese and Fanny are waif figures, with Terese offering a particularly poignant version of the emigrant’s story, searching for work with her mother, who is eventually killed in an accident on a building site.

Visions of America

Following the Second World War, images of America were widely manifest in Europe and the rest of the world via radio, newspapers, and cinema – but at the time that Kafka was writing in 1912 it would be literally Another Country to him, an unknown and exotic place (even though it was a place to which many Europeans were emigrating). Given this, and the fact that he had obviously never been there, it is surprising that he captures so much of its essence in images of very tall buildings (skyscrapers), the grid system of straight roads, of people living in tenement blocks, and the non-stop traffic.

There is also a passage describing a mechanical desk in Uncle Edward’s office which is strangely prophetic:

On its top part, for example, it had a hundred drawers of various sizes, and even the President of the Union could have found a suitable place for every one of his files, but in addition it had a regulator at the side, and by turning the handle one could rearrange and reorganize the drawers in a great variety of ways according to one’s wishes and needs. Thin side partitions slowly descended and formed the base or the top of new drawers that rose up, a single turn of the handle gave the top a quite different appearance, and everything happened slowly or with wild rapidity, depending on how you turned the handle. It was a brand new invention …

This is amazingly prescient of the Memex machine that Vanevar Bush described in imagining computers and hypertext in his 1945 article As We May Think:

A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications … Most of the contents are purchased on microfilm, ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place.

If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions … Any given book from his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf.

Study resources

The Man who Disappeared – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Man who Disappeared – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Amerika: The Man who Disappeared – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Amerika: The Man who Disappeared – Schocken Books – Amazon UK

Kafka: A Very Short Introduction – OUP’s mini series

The Stoker – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg (in German)

The Complete Novels of Kafka – Vintage Classics edition – Amazon UK

Principal characters

Karl Rossmann	a seventeen or fifteen year-old German boy from Prague
Johanna Brummer	thirty-five year-old servant who seduces Karl
Jakob	Karl and Johanna’s son
Butterbaum	Karl’s fellow traveller on the ship
—	The ship’s stoker
—	The ship’s captain
Schumbal	the Romanian chief engineer
—	The ship’s chief purser
Senator Edward Jakob	Karl’s uncle, a rich businessman
Mr Pollunder	a banker and business associate of Karl’s uncle
Klara Pollunder	his daughter
Mr Mack Jnr	son of a millionaire, fiancé to Klara
Mr Mack Snr	millionaire head of a large building firm
Mr Green	gross, bachelor business associate of Karl’s uncle
Robinson	an Irish hypochondriac
Delamarche	a French bully
Grete Mitzelbach	Head Cook at the Hotel Occidental (50)
Terese Berchtold	secretary to the Head Cook (18)
Giacomo	lift boy at the Hotel Occidental
Rennel	lift boy at the Hotel Occidental
Bess	chief lift boy at the Hotel Occidental
Isbary	head waiter at the Hotel Occidental
Feodor	head porter at the Hotel Occidental
Brunelda	Delamarche’s mistress, a fat ex-singer
Joseph Mendel	a student in Delamarche’s apartment block
Fanny	Karl’s trumpet-playing friend

Photomontage

Kafka, family photos, and old Prague

The Man who Disappeared – plot summary

Karl Rossman arrives in New York, having been sent abroad by his parents following an incident with an older servant that resulted in the birth of a son. Karl goes back into the ship to retrieve his umbrella and meets the ship’s stoker, who complains about his treatment on board. Karl accompanies him to plead his case with the ship’s captain. There he meets his uncle Edward Jakob, who is now a rich businessman and a Senator.

Karl lives with his uncle for two months, takes English and riding lessons, and is provided with a piano. He meets a millionaire’s son, Mr Mack, and is invited to the home of banker Mr Pollunder, although his uncle disapproves of the visit.

At Mr Pollunder’s country house Karl is oppressed by the behaviour of his business associate Mr Green, and then is subject to a physical attack by Klara, Mr Pollunder’s daughter.. When he decides to return to his uncle’s house, many obstacles are put in his way to delay his return. It is revealed that Mr Mack is Klara’s fiancé. Finally, Mr Green presents Karl with a letter from his uncle disowning him for going against his wishes. Mr Green gives Karl a train ticket to San Francisco (which he never uses).

Karl meets two unsavoury characters Robinson and Delamarche who take advantage of him. They set off in search of work, eat at his expense, and steal his belongings. Karl escapes from them, and arrives at the Hotel Occidental, where he is befriended by Grete Mitzelbach the head cook and invited to stay for the night.

The cook arranges for Karl to be a lift boy at the hotel. He works twelve hour shifts and sleep in a dormitory filled with smoke, noise, and lift boys boxing and wrestling. Karl befriends Terese, the cook’s secretary, who recounts her difficult life and her mother’s death as poor emigrants.

Robinson reappears at the hotel drunk, and vomits into the stair well. Karl offers him money to leave and puts him into his own bed to sober up. But this briefly takes Karl away from his post on the lifts, for which misdemeanour he is interviewed by the head waiter and head porter, then sacked, despite pleas from his friend the head cook. Karl is physically bullied by the head porter, but finally manages to escape from the hotel – only to find Robinson waiting for him again.

Karl and Robinson are driven to a tenement building where Delamarche is living. There is an altercation involving the police, from which Karl escapes again, only to be rescued by Delamarche and taken back to a squalid and cramped apartment where he lives with Brunelda, a fat ex-singer. Robinson complains about the skivvy work he does for Delamarche and Brunelda, and reveals that they plan to make Karl their servant. They all watch a political rally and procession from the balcony of the apartment. Karl then makes another attempt to escape, which ends up in a fight. He then has a conversation with a student on an adjacent balcony, who advises him to stay with Delamarche.

Novel fragments

Robinson and Karl prepare breakfast for Delamarche and Brunelda in the late afternoon, amidst the squalor of the apartment.

Karl departs with Brunelda, who is hidden under a blanket on a cart.

Karl enrolls in the Theatre of Oklahoma where he meets an old friend Fanny who is playing a trumpet to welcome newcomers. He goes through a complex and bureaucratic recruitment process and is taken on as a technician. At a feast for new recruits he meets his fellow lift boy Giacomo from the Hotel Occidental. They travel by train for two days towards Oklahoma.

Kafka’s writing

a page of Kafka’s manuscript

Franz Kafka: Illustrated Life This is a photographic biography that offers an intimate portrait in an attractive format. A lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished. They depict the author’s world – family, friends, and artistic circle in old Prague – together with original book jackets, letters, and other ephemera. This is an excellent starting point for beginners which captures fin de siecle Europe beautifully.

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Other works by Franz Kafka

Metamorphosis (1915) is truly one of Kafka’s masterpieces – a stunning parable which lends itself to psychological, sociological, or existential interpretations. It’s the tale of a man who wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a giant insect. His family are horrified, gradually disown him, and he dies of neglect, with a rotting apple lodged in his side. Franz Kafka is one of the most important and influential fiction writers of the early twentieth century. He was a novelist and writer of short stories whose works came to be regarded as one of the major achievements of twentieth century literature.

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The Trial is Kafka’s one indisputably successful novel – a haunting and original study in existential anxiety, paranoia, and persecution. Joseph K is accused one day of being guilty – but not told what crime he has committed. He wrestles hopelessly with legal officials and a nightmare-like court which acts on arbitrary rules, striving to find justice. In the end he fails, only to be killed ‘like a dog’. Kafka gave expression to modern anxiety three decades before most people even started feeling it. This is a novel which stands outside literary norms – a superb achievement of literary modernism. Be prepared for black humour as well as mind-bending contradictions and deeply etched literary expressionism. Read the stories and The Trial as a start and a minimum.
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Franz Kafka – web links

Franz Kafka at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews and study guides on the major works, video presentations and documentaries, adaptations for cinema and television, and links to Kafka archives.

Franz Kafka at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats – in both English and German.

Franz Kafka at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, survey of the stories and novels, publishing history, translations, critical interpretation, and extensive bibliographies.

Franz Kafka at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Kafka in Love
Video photomontage featuring portraits of Kafka, his friends and family, and locations in Prague – with a rather schmaltzy soundtrack in Yiddish and English.

Kafka-Metamorphosis
A public Wiki dedicated to Kafka and his work, featuring the short stories, interpretations, and further web links.

Kafka Society of America
Academic group with annual meetings and publications. Also features links to other Kafka-related sites

Oxford Kafka Research Centre
Academic group based at Oxford University that tracks current research and meetings. [Doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012.]

The Kafka Project
Critical editions and translations of Kafka’s work in several languages, plus articles, literary criticism, bibliographies.

Tribute to Franz Kafka
Individual fan site (created by ‘Herzogbr’) featuring a collection of texts, reviews, and enthusiast essays. Badly in need of updating, but contains some interesting gems.

Finding Kafka in Prague
Quirky compilation of photos locating Kafka in his home town – with surrealist additions and weird sound track.

Who Owns Kafka?
Essay by Judith Butler from the London Review of Books on the contentious issues of ownership of Kafka’s manuscripts where they are currently held in Israel – complete with podcast.

The Kafka Archive – latest news
Guardian newspaper report on the suitcase full of Kafka and Max Brod’s papers released by Israeli library.

Franz Kafka: an illustrated life
Book review of a charming short biography with some unusual period photos of Kafka and Prague.

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The Trial

August 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Kafka’s one completed novel masterpiece

The Trial was the only novel Kafka ever 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 an amazingly premonitory account of the horrors in the modern totalitarian world.

It deals with the arbitrary nature of power threatening the freedom of the individual and the 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 in the totalitarian worlds of Stalin’s Russia and the Nazi period of German’s history. Needless to say, it has also become commonplace throughout the world ever since – from Franco’s Spain and Pinochet’s Chile to China, North Korea, and today’s middle-East.

Joseph K’s offense is never explained to him, and the illogical nature of his helplessly vulnerable condition is pursued relentlessly throughout the narrative. Indeed, it gets worse with each of his efforts to understand or do anything about it. He appeals to all forms of bureaucratic authority for help and clarification, but gets nowhere.

Of course, no trial in the ordinary sense of that word takes place. He never discovers the precise charge which is made against him. Once he is arrested, an examining magistrate inquires into the case against him – and the process [Der Prozess is the German title of the novel] gradually merges into the verdict.

Joseph K visits a number of people and even the court itself in pursuit of his self defense. Every venue seems more bizarre than the last. A courtroom which is more like a madhouse; a lawyer’s office which seems more like a derelict cathedral; and a painter’s studio which is packed with lubricious young girls.

Many possible interpretations of the story have been discussed at length in the critical writing on Kafka. First there were the religious and existential approaches to explain why Joseph K feels guilty, even when he doesn’t seem to have done anything wrong. Then the psychoanalytic and biographical theories, based on guilt about his family or his fiancee Felice Bauer to whom he was twice engaged. Western Europeans favoured the existential approach, whereas the old Eastern bloc countries understandably read Kafka as expressing the fate of the individual denied freedom by bureaucratic tyrannies. Both approaches can be equally convincing, and more are possible.

These new editions of Kafka’s main works from Oxford University Press offer fresh translations, and they come with extended introductory essays, full explanatory notes, a bibliography, and both a biographical preface on Kafka and a chronology of his life. They also explain the very complex provenance of the text, and included as a bonus are fragments from the novel discovered amongst Kafka’s papers after his death. Generations of scholars have been unable to decide exactly where they belong in the novel, so they are offered as appendices.

This is one of the key texts in early twentieth century modernism. Kafka was unlike any other writer before or since (even though he has many pale imitators). If you have not read Kafka before, it’s probably better to start with some of his short stories – such as Metamorphosis. When you’re ready, this novel will be waiting for you – like a nightmare ready to happen.

1962 film version – directed by Orson Wells

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Franz Kafka, The Trial, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.191, ISBN: 0199238294

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The Trial

January 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, video, resource materials

Franz Kafka

The Trial – plot summary

Joseph K is a senior bank clerk who lives in lodgings. On his thirtieth birthday he is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents for an unspecified crime. The agents do not name the authority for which they are acting. He is not taken away, however, but left at home to await instructions from the Committee of Affairs.

K goes to visit the magistrate, but instead is forced to have a meeting with an attendant’s wife. Looking at the Magistrate’s books, he discovers a cache of pornography.

He returns home to find Fräulein Montag, a lodger from another room, moving in with Fräulein Bürstner. He suspects that this is to prevent him from pursuing his affair with the latter woman. Yet another lodger, Captain Lanz, appears to be in league with Montag.

Later, in a store room at his own bank, K discovers the two agents who arrested him being whipped by a flogger for asking K. for bribes, as a result of complaints K. previously made about them to the Magistrate. K. tries to argue with the flogger, saying that the men need not be whipped, but the flogger cannot be swayed. The next day he returns to the store room and is shocked to find everything as he had found it the day before, including the Whipper and the two agents.

K is visited by his uncle, who is a friend of a lawyer. The uncle seems distressed by K’s predicament. At first sympathetic, he becomes concerned K is underestimating the seriousness of the case. The uncle introduces K to an advocate, who is attended by Leni, a nurse, who K’s uncle suspects is the advocate’s mistress. K. has a sexual encounter with Leni, whilst his uncle is talking with the Advocate and the Chief Clerk of the Court, much to his uncle’s anger, and to the detriment of his case.

K visits the advocate and finds him to be a capricious and unhelpful character. He returns to his bank but finds that his colleagues are trying to undermine him.

K is advised by one of his bank clients to visit Titorelli, a court painter, for advice. Titorelli has no official connections, yet seems to have a deep understanding of the process. K learns that, to Titorelli’s knowledge, not a single defendant has ever been acquitted. He sets out what K’s options are, but they all consist merely of delaying tactics to stretch out his case as long as possible before the inevitable ‘Guilty’ verdict.

K decides to take control of his own life and visits his advocate with the intention of dismissing him. At the advocate’s office he meets a downtrodden individual, Block, a client who offers K some insight from a client’s perspective. Block’s case has continued for five years and he appears to have been virtually enslaved by his dependence on the advocate’s meaningless and circular advice. The advocate mocks Block in front of K for his dog-like subservience.

K is asked to tour an Italian client around local places of cultural interest, but the Italian client short of time asks K. to tour him around only the cathedral, setting a time to meet there. When the client doesn’t show up, K explores the cathedral which is empty except for an old woman and a church official. K decides to leave as a priest K notices seems to be preparing to give a sermon from a small second pulpit, lest it begin and K be compelled to stay for its entirety. Instead of giving a sermon, the priest calls out K’s name, although K has never known the priest. The priest works for the court, and tells K a fable, (which has been published separately as ‘Before the Law’) that is meant to explain his situation, but instead causes confusion, and implies that K’s fate is hopeless.

Over the course of the year, the stress of the case weighs on K He begins a gradual decline from confident to a nervous state similar to that of the client Block, and those of other broken defendants he meets in the explosively hot law offices. At the bank, he is humiliated by his inability to handle an important client as he is constantly exhausted from worry.

On the last day of K’s thirtieth year, two men arrive to execute him. He offers little resistance, suggesting that he has realised this as being inevitable for some time. They lead him to a quarry where he is expected to kill himself, but he cannot. The two men then execute him by plunging a knife into his heart.