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Franz Kafka is known as one of the most prominent writers from the twentieth century. In 1883 he was born in Prague, which was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time. Kafka’s family is of Jewish decent and was a part of the German speaking community, which was hated and distrusted by the Czech speaking majority of Prague (Kafka’s Life). Kafka is known for his intricate style of writing on peculiar subjects. Many of his novels are based on “real world” problems and societies. Kafka often presents a grotesque representation of society through themes of isolation, guilt, and corruption (Kafka’s Life). The Trial is known as one of Kafka’s greatest feats. It follows a man by the name of Josef K and his sudden arrest one morning for an unnamed crime. Josef desperately tries to thwart the arrest against an unjust and secretive court system, but is eventually killed (The Trial, Kafka). The Trial is not only about a man who lives in a corrupt society, but also a critique on society in the real world. Josef K is a man surrounded by corruption; the government that tries him is unjust, the people he meets are tarnished, and even the air that he breathes is thick with fraud. Josef K seems to be the only seemingly guiltless person in his society. However, corruption marginalizes Kafka from society and eventually kills him off.
The government in the novel is biased and fraudulent. The court system frequently treats its persecuted unjustly. Block the Tradesman is a principal example of a person being treated unfairly by the court system. Block has been under trial for more than five years. The trial takes up all of Block’s time and energy. He has five lawyers and he spends everyday in the lobby of the Law Court Offices. He used t...
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...the unlawful acts described in the novel. It also provides readers the sad truth that every society has corruption no matter how pure it seems. The absurdity of the novel’s plot may make the novel boring or not as enjoyable. However, The Trial provides an uncensored and accurate depiction of history’s societies and should be considered a classic.
Works Cited
"Japanese-American Internment." ushistory.org. Independence Hall Association, n.d. Web. 2 May 2014. .
Kafka, Franz. The trial. Definitive ed. New York: Knopf, 19571956. Print.
"Kafka's Life (1883-1924)." The Kafka Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2014. .
"The Red Scare." ushistory.org. Independence Hall Association, n.d. Web. 3 May 2014. .
In “A Hunger”, “The Penal Colony”, and Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Kafka succeeded in showing his individuals as obsessed with their profession; however their obsession caused their doom because society asks so much from an individual, only so much can be done. However, regardless of that, these individuals choose their work over themselves, and not even bad health or death can stop them. Because society places immures pressure on Kafka’s work obsessed character, they neglect their well-being and cause their own downfall.
"Franz Kafka." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 Feb. 2014
These injustices have begun long before Tom’s trial, but it is his trial which epitomizes the problems with our society. The first witness was simply just a misguided fellow named Heck Tate who it seems didn’t have much to offer to the case. Next, Atticus Finch called Bob Ewell to the stand. When I saw Ewell take the stand such a fierce hatred rose within me that I began to shake and tremble. Ewell wrongfully accused Tom of raping his daughter Mayella, however, with the grace of God, Atticus Finch had shown that it was very possible that it was Bob Ewell who because he was a lefty could have beat Mayella. If it were not for great men like Atticus Finch I would have lost all hope for this world. As I watched Mayella take the stand I wondered how such a kind looking person could be someone of such poor character. Her words seemed to paint a picture of a sad life; one where a father neglects her and she has fallen under hard times. Atticus, after pointing out it was probably Bob who beat her, asked Mayella who it really was that beat her. Mayella made it clear it was Tom Robinson, upon which Atticus asked Tom to stand. To the astonishment of the court Tom was handicapped! Tom was then called to the stand where he laid open for all to see the truth, explaining that it was Mayella who came on to him (that treacherous woman!). Soon enough the trial ended and every one awaited the verdict of the jury. The next few hours were the most nerve wracking of my life.
Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 into a Jewish family. His father, Hermann, was a business owner, and his mother, Julie, was a homemaker. Tragedy struck early in Franz’s life when his siblings passed away when he was 6. Hermann showed a dictatorial way of life during Franz’s childhood which left him very isolated. At this time in Europe, there was a substantial amount of anti-semitism and bigotry towards jews. Not only did Kafkas family receive intolerance for being jewish, but the family was also a german speaking family in the Czech Republic. Kafka was in a completely isolated world, not only from his family, but a...
In order to address the crucial importance of this book review, I shall break down my exposition of the novel into two distinctive sections. The first section I will sermonize will target my deliberation towards the contents of work, themes and subjects of the book. The layout and structure of the content flow effortlessly as the book befalls through chapters that probe a different kind of case that caused innocent human beings to be locked behind bars. These cases that withdraw innocent citizens of their freedom enmesh the lack of evidence and time giving to the defense in order to prove the defendant’s innocence, false accusation involving misjudging of the victim picking of the suspect, and prosecutors that led the victim to believe that the suspect is exigently guilty. Likewise, the theme of the book is
Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
Hunger is a term that is often defined as the physical feeling for the need to eat. However, the Hunger Artist in Kafka's A Hunger Artist places a different, more complex meaning to this word, making the Hunger Artist's name rather ironic. The hunger of the Hunger Artist is not for food. As described at the end of the essay, the Hunger Artist states that he was in fact never hungry, he just never found anything that he liked. So then, what does this man's hunger truly mean? What drives the Hunger Artist to fast for so long, if he is truly not hungry? The Hunger Artist salivates not for the food which he is teased with, nor does he even sneak food when he alone. The Hunger Artist has a hunger for fame, reputation, and honor. This hunger seems to create in the mind of the Artist, a powerfully controlling dream schema. These dreams drive the Artist to unavoidable failure and alienation, which ultimately uncovers the sad truth about the artist. The truth is that the Artist was never an artist; he was a fraudulent outcast who fought to the last moment for fame, which ultimately became a thing of the past.
K.’s demise is a warning. Kafka creates a canvass with K., his lack of a last name allowing us to project our own experiences onto his form: “In The Trial the hero might have been named Schmidt or Franz Kafka. But he is named Joseph K. He is not Kafka and yet he is Kafka. He is an average European. He is like everybody else” (Camus 129). Kafka uses the canvass of Joseph K., rejecting ignorance of the absurd, and perhaps instructing us to reject that ignorance as well. Kafka, like Nietzsche, warns us against living
Neumann, Gerhard. "The Judgement, Letter to His Father, and the Bourgeois Family." Trans. Stanley Corngold. Reading Kafka. Ed. Mark Anderson. New York: Schocken, 1989. 215-28.
They write about the unspoken mysteries of the life of their protagonists. Each of them has produced extraordinary works which make the reader observe the world in new eyes.
The Outsider, written by Albert Camus, and The Trial, written by Franz Kafka, are two books that have been critically acclaimed since the time that they were published. There are critics that claim that The Outsider is a dull book, and is not even a read-worthy book. Other people claim that it shows us how society actually acts upon people who do not want to be like the rest of society. The Trial falls under the same kind of criticism; but both books, although written by different writers in a different époque, fall under the same kind of genre: Imprisoned Lives. In both The Outsider and The Trial there are many people who influence the protagonists in a positive and in a negative way, but none of those characters are as important as the priest. The priest, being of the same profession in both books and trying to accomplish the same kind of tasks, have a totally different effect on the two protagonists. In The Outsider the priest changes the whole attitude that Meursault has to life, whereas in The Trial the priest tells Joseph K. how his life actually is.
• “Franz Kafka.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. 2nd ed. 1998. “KAFKA, Franz.” Funk and Wagnalls New Encyclopedia. CD-ROM. World Almanac Education Group. 2000.
Many people believe that The Judgement was the most autobiographical of Kafka's works. To provide a complete picture, one must analyse both. Franz Kafka was born into a Jewish family in 1883 in Prague, Bohemia. His father was Hermann Kafka, whose father was Jacob Kafka. Hermann Kafka worked in his father's butcher shop until he was able to fend for himself. A number of years later, he married the daughter of his employer, who owned a store. In short, he ‘married up’ to Julie Kafka. She was far more educated than her husband (especially considering that Herman had never received any schooling whatsoever). She later gave birth to Franz and 5 other children. Kafka was the oldest child of 2 brothers (Georg and Heinrich) and 3 sisters (Eli, Valli, and Ottla). The mother helped run his father's business, so she wasn’t at home often, like most others at the time. Just like in The Judgement, Franz Kafka’s relationship with his father is extremely dysfunctional. According to the European Graduate School, Hermann was seen as a “tyrannical figure in the household”. Kafka’s father Hermann, is represented as the antagonist in many of Kafka’s books, and tends to make life miserable for for the son figure (in the book and real life). Because Franz's father Hermann was raised in an impoverished environment, he valued hard work and dedication to his job. For Herman, it was very important to ensure his family had a good life. Franz’s mother Julie was similar; although she didn’t grow up in poverty, she also worked to support the family, leaving Franz with a governess. Due to the regular absences of his parents, Franz felt abandoned by them. Their high expectations only made him hate them more. Although an impartial observer would likely say that F...
During Europe’s period of economic advancement, industrialization, and militia power Franz Kafka crafted a novel that perfectly exemplified what was to become of the country in the following years. Written by Kafka in 1914, The Trial contained numerous totalitarian representations, mocking the form of government in which the citizens are bound to the absolute rule of an autocratic authority. The book was not published and exposed to the world until the initial introduction of despotism in the late 1920s. Kafka did not plan to and was not intentionally mocking the totalitarian state of Eastern Europe, but it is vividly shown through the setting in an impoverished city that is forced to live with conformity, the unexpected arrest of the protagonist, Joseph K., and the corrupt and surreptitious judicial system. Kafka’s oppressive Soviet Union/Nazi Germany allegory was not influenced by the government itself, but by the experiences that he encountered throughout his life.
In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Josef K. is guilty; his crime is that he does not accept his own humanity. This crime is not obvious throughout the novel, but rather becomes gradually and implicitly apparent to the reader. Again and again, despite his own doubts and various shortcomings, K. denies his guilt, which is, in essence, to deny his very humanity. It is for this crime that the Law seeks him, for if he would only accept the guilt inherent in being human (and, by so doing, his humanity itself), both he and the Law could move on.