Knights of Academia discussion

Kafka's The Trial: Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote authority for a crime that is not revealed to him nor to the reader.

My timid impressions of The Trial by Kafka
I’ve never read a novel with more relentless irony than Kafka’s The Trial. It’s an existential, absurd genre of literary work that is both intellectually challenging and utterly depressing, because it seems as if nothing much is happening, but something deeply meaningful is definitely going on. Overall I’m glad I read this book as part of a personal exercise, and not as a school-induced trauma.
I think I have an incomplete understanding of the novel, which is all I can say at this stage. The book itself is very short, 200 pages of staggering intellect and nuanced insight into Kafka’s philosophy, but there are parts that are very slow and plodding, so that it took me three times as many days to read its 200 pages than to read the 400 pages of another novel that another friend recommended to me. And as you’ve certainly noticed in any language you may have read this book in, Kafka’s writing has an unrefined, crude and dense quality that isn’t all that ear-pleasing. I’ve looked briefly into his other works and everywhere I looked, that same law-document style prose greeted me. I guess for Kafka, the language itself is not a poetic venue but rather a functional delivery system for his much higher rated ideas.
This novel does not tell a happy story of a bright world. The narrative focuses on simple routines of the protagonist, but through the oppressing inertia of this unending routine and the absurdity of the actions, the tone is so surprisingly somber and dreary... I got the impression that the bleakness is laid out on thick without having actually encountered anything in the novel that can truly be counted as outright horror. It’s more like the recurrent scenes of the children laying face down in yellow mud, caricatures of humans, descriptions of the filthy slums, and all the imagery of humans worming their way through existence that gave me a general feeling that the book might actually be a dark chronicle of human existence, a gloomy vision of our frustrations when logic and the absurd, the incomprehensible, clash together in our limited understanding of the workings of the world, and how tragically futile it is to fight back against it.
That might be the existential crisis interpretation of the novel. Sometimes it may be a far stretch, but looking at the novel from its title in its original language, it’s a word that translates into the French word “procès”, hence “process” in English. I’m sure there are people who know more than me in this aspect, but I see some link, however obscure, with the concept of psychological processes? In the end it’s established that the protagonist dies resigned to his fate, perhaps it’s an allegorical tale of a dying, free-thinking man coming into terms with the collective acceptance of the meaningless in our society?
On the surface, the story is clearly an examination of bureaucracy under a harsh, judgemental societal paradigm with a Law system so complex and far-reaching that its inner clockwork borders on the absurd. That has been my initial impression. However, and this is probably my religious background (bias?) coming into play here, I’ve been trying to create a mental foothold from a Judeo-Christian angle to try to explore Kafka’s work.
My interpretation might be completely erroneous or far-stretched from the view of someone who is much more experienced with this kind of literature. But in short, I think The Trial is the story of a man who is dying of something and is aware of it, and of his inner thought processes of a death bed conversion but which at the same time is opposed by his values and doubts as a free-thinking person. The guilt imposed on him by the court is the metaphor of the original sin, from which there is no escape and no possibility of defence. This guilt is pre-determined, independent of himself as an individual, and is all-enveloping, hence the absence of the need of a specific accusation. As a sinner, the protagonist is expected to examine his own conscience and dig out all that for which it is necessary to repent. Yet despite this guilt, he is also expected to carry on normally with his life.

There are a lot of symbolic references in the book that I can associate to a Judeo-Christian viewpoint.
The Court = The Church;
Higher officials in the Court = God;
Lower officials in the Court = officials in the Church, who are said to have no more ideas than the ordinary people of who the higher ups might be, but somehow retain an authoritative air over the ignorant masses. They have complex rankings like the painter explained;
The Law Documents = obvious reference to religious texts;

The Trial