Franz Kafka
Il Processo

"The Trial" tells the story of the bank clerk Joseph K., who is arrested and judged by a mysterious court without being informed of the charge: although innocent, he passively undergoes the interrogation, ends up accusing himself, and will be executed. The protagonist thus suffers the violence of an incomprehensible power and an obscure mechanism, is tried for a real or presumed guilt that will never be revealed to him, although he rejects the accusation of having broken the law. But which law? An incomprehensible law for man, yet looming over him until it makes him feel profoundly guilty.

This situation is then narrated by the external narrator, without rhetorical figures and instead in a realistic and meticulous way, making a completely implausible and absurd situation become absolutely normal: this narrative artifice makes the events even more anguishing for the reader, constantly siding with the victim-character, almost forcing a fast and disorienting reading that can bring about the conclusion, whatever it may be, of the nightmare. The conclusion will be desolately tragic: the last words of the protagonist, as he is executed with a knife to the heart, are "like a dog", a resigned protest against the inhuman justice of an "invisible" court where he had never arrived, judged by a judge he had never seen.

The invisible court and Joseph K.'s cruel executioners can be interpreted as dark personifications of contemporary man's sense of guilt, or, in a religious perspective, as divine judgment pursuing aims incomprehensible to man, or even more "simply", in a social dimension, as the cogs of State bureaucracy and justice that crush the individual, condemning an innocent. But the interpretations, although tied to the theme of guilt and condemnation (main themes of Kafka's work), can be others, and this is precisely the charm of the novel, its ambiguity that makes it open to subjective interpretations.

I take the liberty of quoting the last lines of the story, disorienting, which left me pensive about Kafka's vision of life; at that point, I decided to read "The Metamorphosis" not knowing that the nightmare was not over...

"now the hands of one of the gentlemen rested on K.'s throat while the other plunged the knife into his heart and turned it twice. With eyes about to fade, K. managed to see the gentlemen, cheek against cheek near his face, observing the outcome. "like a dog!" he said, and it seemed to him that the shame should survive him."