On Trial in Kafka, Camus, and Nabokov

1. “The Trial”, by Franz Kafka, 1925

Josef K., a junior bank manager, awakens one morning and is arrested by two unidentified agents for an unspecified crime. As Josef K. tries to defend himself, he becomes lost in a sea of bureaucracy, in which no one will tell him his crime. He is presumed guilty until declared innocent. Plot points involve an odd visit to the magistrate; an interminable and strange visit to the courthouse; and a surreal run-in with a priest, who shares a parable with him about the nature of the Law, which implies that K. is helpless within his predicament. Throughout “The Trial”, K. retains a sense of guilt – perhaps referring to the nature of original sin. The final, inevitable, scene demonstrates the view that an individual’s humanity is both destructible, and impossible to live without (much like in Kafka's “The Metamorphoses”, where the narrator is literally transformed into an insect, and then destroyed). Another note is that “The Trial” was published posthumously and unfinished; on his deathbed, Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to destroy the manuscript, but he did not.

2. “The Stranger”, by Albert Camus, 1946

In this slim novel, a young Algerian, Mersault, has just killed a man under relatively defensible circumstances. Once his trial begins, however, it is clear that he is not being tried for the murder but for his character, or lack thereof. The murder itself is ignored, and Mersault is eventually damned based on trivialities including his inability to cry at his mother’s funeral. “The Stranger” is best known for its existentialist nature (although Camus did not consider himself an existentialist), and its theme of the absurdity of human existence in an indifferent universe.

3. “Invitation to a Beheading,” Vladimir Nabokov, 1938

Set in a prison in a mythical totalitarian country, Cincinnatus C. waits for his execution. He has been imprisoned and sentenced to death for “gnostic turpitude”. Cincinnatus C.’s crime is never clearly understood by the reader or by C., except that he is “peculiar” and that others are made uncomfortable by his presence. Most disturbing to C. while he is in his cell is that he does not know when he will be executed. Most of the novel involves his wait, and his writing in his diary – he has ceased to see the world around him as “real”, and considers it and those who populate it to be an illusion. Despite the fact that there are signifiers throughout the novel alluding to the time of his death – the pencil that C. uses to write in his diary being worn down; the eating habits of a spider that occupies his cell; and the fact that his execution date is actually marked on a calendar that has been shown to him, C. cannot recognize them. When Cincinnatus C. is executed, he ceases at that moment to believe in death; and instead feels his spirit rise “to others like himself”.


Commentary: “The Trial”, “The Stranger”, and “Invitation to a Beheading” all have common elements: a protagonist who is being held accountable to an unknown crime; a bureaucratic system that is impenetrable; and an absurdist, existentialist quality in the nature of the accusations and in the relative weighting of human existence. Despite the fact that it was an unfinished novel, “The Trial” is the most comprehensive of these, showing a confused yet strangely guilty Josef K. attempting (and failing) to use reason to discover the nature of his crime. In “The Stranger”, the absurdity of the trial (for lack of remorse for minor assaults on human nature, not for the murder) is juxtaposed with Mersault’s dissociation from humanity, and basic inability to be ruffled by the punishment awaiting him. In “Invitation to a Beheading”, Cincinnatus C. wishes away the bureaucracy, its citizens, and their inconsistencies by viewing them as un-real; however, he finds himself unable to acknowledge the reality of his own deathwatch (he is, in fact, shown the calendar which marks the date of his death). In all three, disenfranchised outsiders are forced to question their own humanity by a threatening yet absurd group of spectators.





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