Why did he go along peacefully?

One of the worst interpretations I've ever come across, bravo

this

Kafka was a turbo autist.
Law is an allegory for society.
Who determines the rules of social interaction? How do you know what is right or wrong? Does any of it make any sense at all or is it your fault for not getting it?
Those are the sort of questions that bothered him.

t.turbo autist

At some point you just realize that fighting the higher powers/life's mechanisms is useless

“I want to see Mrs. Grubach … ,” said K., making a movement as if tearing himself away from the two men even though they
were standing well away from him and wanted to go.

“No,” said the man at the window, who threw his book down on a coffee table and stood up.

“You can’t go away when you’re under arrest.” “That’s how it seems,” said K.

Reaching into the pockets of his suit jacket, K. drew two glock 18 machine pistols and unloaded the magazines into the two men before they had realized what happened.

dropping the pistols, he put on a pair of sunglasses.

"looks like things just got a little Kafkaesque"

because he's a dog

Kek...!

wow I lole'd
that's so 80's action flick like haha

The book is about the helplessness and lack of direction that one will feel when lost in a bureaucratic system. Except that nothing good comes from it, unlike say Kurosawa's Ikiru where Watanabe overcomes it. K. never does overcome it and becomes a victim without really knowing what to do about it.

That helplessness is something that can be related to. Plus, The Trial is severe gallows humour where the punchline is always on the protagonist.

I think curiosity plays a role in his reluctance to resist as well. He wants to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Because he never fully wanted to resist the court in the first place.

He acts out the roles of the court himself, replaying with Fraulein whatever-her-name-is his interaction with his arrestors, and replicating in his own office a simulacrum of the law offices (keeping visitors waiting for hours in a waiting room deescribed as "clouded" when he gazes out).

He wants to become part of the court -- that's why he dismisses Huld. The book is about the struggle between wanting the concrete and definite (bank) vs wanting the abstract and intangible (court), best exemplified in a fragmentary chapter where the bank president rebukes him for his friendship with Hasterer the public prosecutor.

Entrance into the Law is achieved -4 least metaphorically through transcendence of the material and concrete -- through death.

Learned helplessness. If no attempt to overcome something is ever rewarded, you will stop trying to overcome it.

Shit...

He did fight back. He threw the stick of dynamite back at the executors causing them to run away.

I always thought the end was incongruous in that it seems to happen some time after the events depicted in the main text. What the fuck happened in the intervening period?

Why is it that critics are able to see symbolic or allegorical frameworks in the work Kafka? What can you REALLY say about the meaning of The Trial? Isn't it JUST a parable on the impersonality of the bureaucratic rule of paperwork, formalism and procedure? Even if you were to say it was a parable on the mystic source of The Law, that would be, to my mind, an exegetical extrapolation, bad philology. You must simply admit that the imaginative act of writing is not always equal to authorial intention.

Wow... A thread which holds actual discussion. What the fuck is happening?

humor

It seems there's a debilitating malaise that drags on K the further he gets into the Trial. It's inevitable judgment which "merges into the proceedings" become obvious to K.

As for him going peacefully, I'm not sure that's true, at least in the first part of the book.

Further, my professor has a good point: while we assume K. isn't guilty, are we correct? Who is to say that K. isn't actually guilty? I remember a sequence in which K.'s co-worker digs through his desk for incriminating papers. Perhaps K.'s half-hearted attempts can be partially explained by his guilt. Bankers, in particular, seem indicative of some under-the-table, illegal practices.

Kafka actually states that K. is innocent by the opening sentence: ''Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything he was arrested one fine morning.''

You can never know for sure if you are guilty or not because there are is an infinite number of rules and you have no way of knowing all of them and you have no way of being sure that the ones you know about actually exist which in itself might be some sort of offense. So realistically speaking there is no way you are not guilty of at least something.

Isn't the narrator partially filtered through the mind of K.?

Gotta remember that The Trial, like most of Kafka's work, was published in an unfinished form. Kafka asked Max Brod on his deathbed to burn all his works, but Brod decided they were too good not to publish.

He may be unaware of his guilt in the beginning, yes. But once the monstrous, ceaseless innerworkings of the court are revealed, perhaps K. came to realize his guilt in some practice

Reminder: Kafka was suffering from tuberculosis at the time and, while it's normally a bad idea to filter a novel through a historical lens, the story can be read as Kafka's own surrendering to illness.

The crushing malaise pervasive throughout the work, in my mind, reinforces this partial interpretation

It says "without him having done anything bad" which does not necessarily mean he's innocent.

His guilt was not being the citizen the law wants him to be. He didn't do anything particulary wrong outside of wanting to fight the corruption of the people in power.

I'm not sure we can completely surmise that from the text.

This however is the only time in the novel where a sentence isn't from the claustrophobic perspective of Josef K (which is a very limited point of view), which leads me to believe that it's true. How could K. know that someone was slandering him?

Not saying it's not true, but not having done something bad does not mean that one is innocent.

I believe the story that the priest tells him in the cathedral finally makes K. understand that his trial will ultimately only end in death. His life isn't in his hands anymore, it's in the hands of the authorities, and he'll never be completely free ever again in his life. The trial will end once K. is in the grave.

So why not just die rofl

>m-my allegories!

fuckin reddit alert

It's not just about going along with something despite disagreeing because you can't change it, accepting helplessness or defeat. This is the generic existential stance.
>life is so pointless and meaningless and everyone but me is so shallow and stupid and they just don't understand how I feel so I hate everything wah wah
Typically existential philosophy looks for a cause for suffering anywhere but in itself. It's always the fault of other poeple, human nature or just the way the things are. The only person you can depend on if at all is yourself.
Kafka's writing is saturated with sympathy for the human condition. The setup of the average Kafka story describes the existential state of being placed against your will in a situation you don't understand but believing you don't have the right to question this so as not to be a burden other people and feeling guilty for being placed in this situation in the first place through some fault of your own.

underrated

Well he knew that long before the conversation with the priest. It becomes evident pretty quickly when his lawyer explains the three methods of dealing with the trial. The only way to get completely free is to be taken on by elite lawyers who may or may not exist.

Yeah man, I understand that. It just seems as if critics wish to finish his work for him by reading things into it that are not actually there

Kafka didn't develop TB until 1917, a few years after he stopped working on The Trial.

Yeah, sure, he just wanted to write about non-existing courts of law because why not. It's, like, fantasy or something. Everybody knows that Kafka writes genre fiction. Allegory is just myth. The plot is the most important thing.

What did he mean by this?

Allegories and symbols are for plebs, there is only metaphor

>semantics

Yes, you're right. I'm not sure how I got that confused with The Hunger Artist.

Good fact check user

No, not really.

>Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.

Calling so-and-so a symbol or allegory immediately impoverishes it and places it into a representative framework that destroys ambiguity

His execution was a chance for him to choose his death. He could have grabbed the knife and killed himself. But he didn't. He never grew up to become a man. And him not fighting is the other thing that he learned nothing through his life. He had found no value in it. So, he gave up, because he had nothing to lose.

Now I disagree even more.
An allegory doesn't necessarily have to be a mathematical construct and the use of allegory is not any more conscious than the use of metaphor.
The difference between allegory and metaphor is one of extent.
A symbol is even less concrete than that. A symbol more than anything is a product of the unconsciousness.
It would be unreasonable from us to expect an author to understand every single concept in his work.Still to claim that an author didn't put any intent in his work or doesn't have any interpretation of it would be absurd.

Edgy.

To be honest, that what my teacher told me, I never though of it as the most correct interpretation.

What?He, like, actually has a literature degree?
Disgusting.
Tell your teacher that an autist on a children's image board said that he doesn't have even basic understanding of human condition.

Power lies in cooperation. It's an ambiguous parable. Every interpretation is valid. :^)

he, like kafka himself, was an intp. it is fairly common for them to act this way

I just can't get into kafka's shitty prose

you should not read a translation then

is Orson Welles' film of it any good?

Yes. I cannot think of a more perfect casting choice than faggot Anthony Perkins.

delete this, his prose is amazing
you'll only fully understand if you know german

Yeah, it's very good. It's obvious that he was very familiar with not only the trial, but all of Kafka's texts (including the shorts). The film is an amalgamation of Kafka's entire bibliography.

Or paper German, I suppose. I pity anyone suggesting that Kafka's prose is less than excellent

Accept that The Trial is Kafka's masterpiece.

The Metamorphosis > The Trial

What is the meaning of social interaction? In the end it was all just about sex. Just like the Law books he found in the court house.

>“Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it."

What did he mean by this?

What do you mean by that?

It's like the Universe has some sort of a special secret that you don't know and if you knew it everything would make sense and everything would be fine and you hope that some day somebody will tell you this secret but they never do whether it is because they don't know it either or that there is some sort of universal pact that you should forever be left in ignorance.

(you)

I never understood why the women were so into K. Can someone explain this to me?

If the user I replied to happens to be right, the part of the book where K. opens up one of the law books and sees a pornographic picture could be part of the allegory. I really doubt it now that I write it out though.

I see. As I said by allegory I don't mean it represents something with mathematical precision.
Still if something exists it must mean something.
For example this could be the fear that there is really no mysterious secret behind the ubiquitous edifice of Law, that there is no Great Answer for everything , that the Universe is just a cruel joke.

yeah that there is no secret to life and it is all just masturbatory. I agree

N... Nnnnnnnn..... Ni.... n I g g e r