44 pages • 1 hour read
Franz KafkaThe Trial
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1925A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Flogger”
A few days pass. One night, as K. is leaving the bank to go home, he hears strange noises coming from the junk room. He opens the door to investigate and finds two men being whipped by a third man. He demands to know what is going on and is informed by the “Flogger” that the two men being whipped are the warders who had been sent to arrest K. They are now being punished because K. complained about their conduct at his initial inquiry. K. responds with horror and disgust. He explains that he holds the court, not the warders, responsible for what happened to him, and asks the Flogger to let the men go. But the Flogger cannot oblige K. As the Flogger goes about his work, K. leaves the room. When his assistants are drawn by the noise, he tells them that it’s just a dog howling outside.
K. remains troubled by the situation the next day. When he leaves the bank, he looks into the junk room once again and is shocked to find the warders and Flogger exactly where they were the previous evening. K. shuts the door and flees. Before going home, he orders the assistants to clear the junk room, and they promise to do so the next day.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Uncle Karl”
K. is visited by his Uncle Karl, a commanding, authoritative man who has learned of the trial and is very concerned. He tells K. that he should take the matter more seriously, as the trial could be damaging not only for K. but for his whole family too. Uncle Karl suggests he enlist the services of a lawyer friend, Herr Huld, and presses K. to come with him to see him.
K. and his uncle find Huld sick in bed, being cared for by his nurse Leni. Uncle Karl is rude to Leni and demands that she leave them alone. Huld, who already knows of K.’s trial, tells him that he is in serious trouble but agrees to help him in spite of his own condition. Huld brags of his court connections, revealing that in fact the chief clerk of the court is in the room with them, sitting in the shadows. The chief clerk comes out and begins to speak. K., feeling ignored, is lured out of The room by Leni. She and K. withdraw to Huld’s study, where Leni seduces K. In the room, K. notices a large portrait of a judge on a throne, whom Leni identifies as an examining magistrate.
K. finally leaves the lawyer’s house and finds his uncle waiting on the street. Uncle Karl scolds K., telling him that his disappearance has done further damage to his case. The chief clerk waited for K. to return and left, and Uncle Karl himself had to wait for hours out in the rain.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Lawyer; Manufacturer; Painter”
K. is sitting in his office reflecting on his trial, with which he is now constantly preoccupied. Frustrated by the labyrinthine workings of the court and his lawyer’s limited capacity for action, K. is thinking about submitting an exhaustive petition to the court on his own behalf. Since he still does not know the charges against him, he would include in the petition:
a brief overview of his life, and for each event of any particular importance, explain why he had acted as he did, whether in his present judgment this course of action deserved approval or censure, and what reasons he could advance for the one or the other (112).
K. cannot concentrate on his work, leaving many important clients waiting outside his office as he thinks about his case. When K. does admit a client into his office, a manufacturer, his inability to give the necessary attention to the matter attracts his rival, the vice president, who interrupts and takes over the case. As the manufacturer is leaving, he speaks briefly with K., revealing that he knows about his case and urging him to seek out a friend of his, a man who goes by the name of Titorelli. This Titorelli paints portraits for officials of the court and consequently has a great deal of information about—and even influence with—the court (it was from Titorelli, the manufacturer explains, that he learned about K.’s case). The manufacturer advises K. to visit Titorelli and see if he can be of assistance to him.
K. immediately goes out to see Titorelli, apologizing to his waiting clients for his failure to see them today (and providing another opportunity for the vice president to insinuate himself into K.’s business as he assures the clients that he will take care of them). K. finds that the painter lives in a poor part of town (he compares his apartment to the building in which he found the court). Inside, he encounters a group of raucous teenage girls who help him find the painter and afterward wait outside the door, listening and interrupting the conversation.
Titorelli, who inherited the position of court painter from his father, tells K. more about the court and offers to help K. He describes the three possible acquittals: actual acquittal, which can only be granted by the high court and which Titorelli has never encountered in his personal experience; apparent acquittal, which involves lobbying several judges to sign a certification of innocence and submitting this petition to the presiding judge, after which no further steps need to be taken until the case is inevitably reopened; and protraction, in which one maintains constant contact with the court to keep the case in its early stages and avoid conviction. As he listens to Titorelli, K. feels increasingly oppressed by the stuffy air in the room, and finally gets up to leave, telling Titorelli that he will think about which of the options he prefers. Before letting him go, Titorelli gets K. to purchase several old and identical landscapes that he pulls out from under his bed. He then leads K. to a backdoor (ostensibly to avoid the girls, who are still waiting outside). This backdoor leads to a corridor filled with more court offices, and Titorelli explains to the baffled K. that the court has offices in almost every attic. An usher escorts K. out of the building.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
Chapters 5-7 find K. growing increasingly preoccupied with his case. Whereas in earlier chapters K. generally pretended to find the situation laughable and insignificant—even if his actions often belied such macho posturing—K. is soon unable even to feign indifference toward his trial and its outcome. K. is truly troubled, for instance, by the sight of the two warders being whipped in the junk room of his bank, and cannot stop thinking about them the following day. Even when K.’s uncle scolds K. for paying so little attention to the case, he cannot help but notice how the trial has affected K., pointing out that he has “lost some weight” (93-94) since he last saw him. By Chapter 7, K. can no longer concentrate on his work, and the narrator observes that “the thought of his trial never left him now” (111).
Meanwhile, The Absurdity of Bureaucracy grows more and more obvious. In particular, K. learns much about the court from the lawyer Huld and the painter Titorelli. Chapter 7 especially inundates the reader with information on the convoluted inner workings of the court. The court, in short, is completely arbitrary and corrupt; there are many trials like K.’s, and in such trials the law counts for very little, with the outcome influenced not by evidence but rather by one’s relationships with officials of the lower court (this being the case only because officials of the higher court are “totally inaccessible” (158), as Titorelli frankly tells K.). Kafka’s court—differentiated on a few occasions from the “normal court” (193)—seems almost allegorical, with nameless characters like the “Flogger” representing its punitive aspect and its virtual omnipresence. Soon, this omnipresence does not even surprise K. When he finds more court offices in the attic of Titorelli’s building, he is less shocked by the discovery than he is “shocked at himself, at his ignorance when it came to the court” (164). For all its omnipresence and seeming omnipotence, the court chooses to conduct its business in dark, hidden, and airless places, such as attics or the junk room of K.’s bank. The court, moreover, revels in contradictory symbols, such as the combination of Justice and Victory K. spots on one of Titorelli’s portraits. The possible outcomes of the trial highlight its absurdity. Not only is the procedure meaningless, but it works actively to thwart interpretation. “Actual acquittal” is described as the stuff of legends, while “apparent acquittal” is a virtual nonsense phrase, and “protraction” suggests a process endlessly drawn out for no purpose other than to avoid its inevitably dreadful conclusion. At times, the actions of the court pass into the realm of the impossible, as when K. returns to his bank’s junk room the day after encountering the Flogger and warders there, only to find that “everything was unchanged” (86) and that the men are still there, exactly where he had left them. K. himself seems to recognize the impossibility and unreality of the court, on one occasion even reflecting that had he ignored the trial “then the trial would surely never have occurred at all” (124-25): In the metaphysics of Kafka’s novel, the trial seemingly becomes real because K. has made it real.
If the court of Kafka’s novel is an allegory, it’s one that is ambiguous enough to apply in many directions. Some critics see the court as a critique of the extensive bureaucracies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which Kafka, as an insurance agent, knew intimately. To others, Kafka’s work is almost prescient, looking forward to the authoritarian regimes that spread across more and more of the world in the middle of the 20th century (a situation that, at least historically, had its origins in the political and social troubles of Kafka’s day, so that Kafka’s prescience may not be an accident but rather an acute sensitivity to historical shifts that were becoming increasingly inevitable). But the court can also be understood as a critique of the hierarchical and corrupt religious institutions of the early modern period, or even as an expression of existential and psychological angst.
The role of women in the novel is also noteworthy. In early-20th-century Prague, women of the working class often served as the mistresses of men in the professional class, such as the banker K. or even Kafka himself. This practice, a product of the relative powerlessness of lower-class women during the period, is recreated in the novel. By Chapter 6, three women have shown some sort of sexual interest in K.—namely, Fräulein Bürstner, the usher’s wife, and Leni (K. has also alluded, at several points, to his relationship with the waitress Elsa). The usher’s wife and Leni in particular claim to be powerfully attracted to K., and even cause distractions to get closer to him. Such attractions go beyond reason, as K. himself acknowledges (“I recruit women helpers, he thought, almost amazed” (107). Yet K. is ultimately too conceited to interrogate the matter more deeply, and his reliance on these women actually harms him over the course of the novel: Indeed, on multiple occasions K. compromises his case for women, for instance in his confrontation with the law student in Chapter 4 and later by ignoring the chief clerk to spend time with Leni in Chapter 7.
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By Franz Kafka
