FREE ESSAY ON KAFKA /GUILT

KAFKA /GUILT

Guilt has relative existence; in one sense or another, every man experiences guilt.
Whether or not this guilt is worthy of punishment, however, is another question. For
this, modern society has created trials that decide whether or not a person is guilty.
However, sometimes the actual guilt or innocence of an individual is not the most
important aspect of his or her trial. 
In the novel, The Trial, Franz Kafka uses his main character Joseph K to show the
unimportance of the actual guilt of an individual. Although K is arrested and summoned by
the courts, he is never informed of his crime, or questioned on his actual guilt. The
trial that K is put through can be interpreted on two levels, the first of which is a
literal interpretation of a criminal trial. The second level can be seen as the internal
trial that he must go through to cope with his own anxiety. K and his trial are used to
represent the eternal guilt of human beings in the eyes of a bureaucracy, and in this
sense, K is guilty. However, the question of K's guilt is not important to Kafka's
intention to show his idea that the innocent and the guilty [are] both executed without
distinction in the end. In Kafka's beliefs, the courts treat all men as if they were
guilty. Joseph K is a prime example of this treatment. He is never told about his crime,
nor of how the trial is going. He merely waits until he is summoned, and if he is not, he
is still forced to live his life according to the courts. This is what Kafka believes
happens to all individuals; they are controlled by the society, and forced to agree with
what the society implements upon them. K never found out what his alleged crime was, and
will never find out. However, he was forced to agree with his own guilt because the
society did not give him any other option. When he was told of his three possible
outcomes, none included a statement of innocence. K allowed the trial and the pressure to
run his daily life, and was never able to return to his normal lifestyle. However, one
night, the prison guard summons K to the church to have a conversation. Kafka uses a
story inside of the story to provide an explanation to why K can never get anything
accomplished when it comes to his case. While K is in the church, the prison guard tells
him a story of a man who tried to enter the courts, and K realizes that what the guard is
saying is the exact reason that K will never be able to do anything about his case. The
man in the story wanted to enter the courts, but the doorman would not allow him passage.
The man waited his entire life hoping to get through the door, but he never did. As the
man was dying, he asked the doorkeeper why no one else has tried to enter the door, and
the doorkeeper replied that the door is only meant for that man. In K's case, K wants to
learn more about his trial, and attempt to make a difference, but he can not even get
through the first door of courts to begin. Much like the man in the story, K is never
able to get through the door, and he too dies without ever seeing the inside of the
courts. Kafka openly shows his distrust in society by using K's death as an example of
what happens to mankind when the bureaucracy becomes stronger than its members. In the
beginning of his trial, K was very fearful of all of the possible outcomes, and relied on
other people, such as his lawyer and numerous women, to attempt to help him with his
case. This inability to rely on himself is exactly what the bureaucracy wanted him to do.
However, after a few months of this, K decides that the lawyer and the women can not help
him, and he must attempt to fight the battle himself. But the courts do not agree with
K's decision, and the trial abruptly comes to a stop when two men come to give K his
ultimate punishment. They take him away, yet he does not struggle, and in reality, he is
the one leading them. When they finally reach the outskirts of town, they throw K on a
rock and begin to pass a knife over his body. K believes that he is supposed to take the
knife and kill himself, but he will not, and he forces the two men to kill him.
Immediately before he dies, he sees arms reach out to him from a window far away. These
arms are the arms of mankind, and are telling K that he is finally free of the courts and
of the bureaucracy that once controlled his life. In the novel, The Trial, Franz Kafka
uses Joseph K to represent mankind, and uses K's trial to show the endless struggle
between mankind and the bureaucracy was created by mankind. Kafka believes that the
bureaucracy does not worry about the facts or about the individuals. Everyone will be
executed in the end. To the bureaucracy, K is guilty and worthy of death, because he lost
the trial. He did not lose the literal trial because it never progressed; he lost the
internal trial that he was forced to put himself through. But K's actual guilt is a
question that will never be answered, because Kafka did not give us an answer. Our
inability to know the truth is what forces us to see what Kafka is implying in the story.
Guilt and innocence are not important when the bureaucracy has the strength to create the
laws, the trials, and the verdicts. 
Joseph is still uncertain of his crime but even more uncertain of his
innocence. Joseph's incessant evasion of responsibility is what he is
guilty of in this particular chapter. From the beginning of the novel,
Joseph never takes responsibility for himself or the trial. He appears to
blame everyone else for the trial, and passes along the responsibility of
helping him win his case to the other characters in the book. Even in the
remaining last minutes before his death, Joseph refuses to take
responsibility for his life continuing to deny his guilt. For this reason,
Joseph dies an empty death,