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 guil
Joseph is still uncertain of his crime but even more uncertain of hisinnocence. The man waited his entire life hoping to get through the door, but he never did. When they finally reach the outskirts of town, they throw K on a rock and begin to pass a knife over his body. Everyone will be executed in the end. However, one night, the prison guard summons K to the church to have a conversation. 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. He is never told about his crime, nor of how the trial is going. However, he was forced to agree with his own guilt because the society did not give him any other option. 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. To the bureaucracy, K is guilty and worthy of death, because he lost the trial. Immediately before he dies, he sees arms reach out to him from a window far away. He did not lose the literal trial because it never progressed; he lost the internal trial that he was forced to put himself through. K never found out what his alleged crime was, and will never find out. Even in theremaining last minutes before his death, Joseph refuses to takeresponsibility for his life continuing to deny his guilt. They take him away, yet he does not struggle, and in reality, he is the one leading them.
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