The air of obfuscation pervading the court house indicates that it, although supposedly a public good, is a highly secretive and nearly inaccessible institution. The symmetry here is reminiscent of a clever maze because it makes the path to the court house indistinguishable even with specific directions, which are unfortunately only given to people already in trouble and at the mercy of the court. encounters when he steps into the building for the first time. This fetish is illustrated by the symmetry of the four stairway entrances that K. It is clear that the structure is not designed to serve the needs of outsiders such as the general public which it supposedly serves. On his first visit, he goes '.over to the stairway to get to the room where the hearing was to take place, but then stood still again as besides these steps he could see three other stairway entrances, and there also seemed to be a small passageway at the end of the yard leading into a second yard.' (28). encounters, the court house, as being difficult to access as if on purpose. Kafka's introduces his reader to the power structure of modern society by illustrating the physical structures which represent its power. K.'s attempts to understand the purpose of the power structure persecuting him are frustrated because the power structure has no actual meaning or purpose, existing instead for the sole purpose of following is own rules and internal logic.ġ) The court house: Its claustrophobic nature and labyrinthine structure to further clarify the theme of bureaucratic excess. Thesis: 'The Trial' is a critique of the bureaucratized nature of power in modern society and its effect on the modern individual's will. Like most Modernist writers, Kafka used his art to express his sense of alienation and powerlessness in an increasingly hostile, meaningless, and dehumanized world. Left on the shelf by Kafka in 1915, the book was published in 1925 during the tense interwar period, which was, not coincidentally, the heyday of Modernist literature.

It was at once an astute, even prescient critique of modern power structures as well as a novel that does not quite make sense from a literary perspective. Franz Kafka's possibly unfinished novel, 'The Trial,' is one of the great mysteries of modernist literature.

Kafka the trial pages