The first book which I read was a novella called ‘The Metamorphosis’ and the second one which I completed last night is ‘The Trial’. Albeit both of them were different but one thing which was quite common in both them was the suffering from the main characters, In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa turned into a bug and becomes helpless of doing anything on his own and eventually dies, similarly in, The Trial, Joseph K. got arrested one morning for no reason and has to go through a trial without even knowing the reason of his arrest till the very end and eventually murdered.
The Trial by Franz Kafka.
The Trial is one of the best works of Franz Kafka. The Trial is incomplete because Kafka died before completing it in the middle but still considered as one of its kind. The story revolves around the main character Joseph K., who happens to be a chief clerk at a bank, one morning, on the 30th birthday of K., got arrested and investigated in his own house for no reason, and then after a few hours, he got released for yet another no solid reason. K. has to go through numerous trials for about a year but was unable to find any reason for his arrest. He met a lot of people during his trial days in order to get some assistance through them but was unable to find the purpose of meeting those people. After a year of suffering from the trial a night before his 31st birthday, he was taken to an unknown place by two of the court officials (policemen maybe) and was executed with a knife which was plunged into his heart and twisted there twice just to make sure he died properly. “Like a dog!” was his last words as if he was ashamed of his life. In this book, Kafka showed how complex and at the same time corrupt the judicial system is, no matter what you do once you can’t get out of it. More than justice the judicial system is a business. Kafka in his own words describes that “The trial was nothing but a big piece of business.” This book, The Trial, is about a philosophical idea of ‘Existentialism’ meaning ‘meaninglessness’ or ‘purposelessness’. Existentialism is an idea which mainly focuses on how we all do different things in our lives every day but if we look at it from a different point of view most of it doesn’t make much sense, simply putting we do a lot of work (or you can say everything) in our lives purposelessly.
The Metamorphosis By Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis is one piece of art that describes helplessness in the best way possible. In this story, Franz Kafka quite precisely showed the helplessness that has been suffered by the main character, Gregor Samsa, when gets transformed into a bug one morning. This story also tells us how we lost all our importance among the people to whom we’ve dedicated our whole life to. Once we are unable to do what is expected of us, people for whom we’ve worked for our whole lives, started treating us like trash, which is quite nicely depicted by the role of Gregor Samsa, who once turned into a bug, has lost all the respect that he deserved from his family members, respect and hospitality that he used to get when he was a human being and taking all the expenses of the family on his shoulders.
