Intelligence on Trial: Intelligence and Its Relation to Possibility in Franz Kafka’s Novel,The Trial

Introduction

Franz Kafka’s (1937, 1956) novel, The Trial, was published posthumously and never completely finished. Kafka only lived until the age of 40, at which time he died of tuberculosis, so his time to finish his works was short. Moreover, he was a lawyer and had various jobs in the insurance industry, which allowed him only limited time for his writing. Kafka instructed Max Brod, his literary executor, to burn the manuscript for the novel after Kafka’s death, along with most of his other work. Fortunately, Brod failed to follow Kafka’s directive.

Kafka’s (1937, 1956) The Trial is truly one of the great novels of all times. In some senses, it is a novel about possibilities foreclosed. The possibilities are foreclosed by a society that appears to shun transparency with regard to the nature of an accusation and that makes a fair trial impossible. Eventual freedom, in the novel, is out of the question. But The Trial is also a novel about how a protagonist, given possibilities for living in an imperfect and unjust society, chooses not to accept those possibilities and instead seals his own fate. The novel deals with both objective uncertainty—where the future is not yet decided (in particular, the outcome of a case against the protagonist of the novel) and subjective uncertainty (with the protagonist, despite assiduously seeking facts, never finding enough of them or, at least, those that are crucial to his future—Baumeister & Alquist, 2023).

The renown of the book is shown by the fact that it was listed by Le Monde, the prestigious French newspaper, in its list of 100 Books of the Century, published in 1999, where it was ranked #3 overall for books of the 20th century and #1 for books of the 20^th century written in German. (Unsurprisingly, the books ranked #1 and #2 were originally published in French, as the poll itself was conducted among the French public.). The novel was adapted for film in 1962 by Orson Welles, starring Anthony Perkins (as well as Orson Welles), with another version directed by David Jones and starring Anthony Hopkins issued in 1993.

The novel of The Trial, together with Kafka’s other works, and especially Metamorphosis (Kafka, 1916/1996—in which a man wakes up and finds he has turned into an insect, possibly a cockroach), has given rise to the adjective Kafkaesque, which is defined by Merriam-Webster online as referring to a situation “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Kafkaesque). The term Kafkaesque is often applied to extremely complex, inscrutable, possibly unknowable, and senseless bureaucratic structures.

The Trial is listed in AbeBooks’ “100 Fiction Books to Read in a Lifetime” and is on “Goodreads” lists of Best Books Ever, Books that Everyone Should Read at Least Once, Best Books of the 20th Century, Best Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, Best Philosophical Literature, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and many others of Goodreads’ lists as well (https://www.goodreads.com/list/book/17690). There are Kafka festivals and Montblanc has even issued (expensive) pens in Kafka’s honor for its Writer’s Edition pens. (Disclosure: The author of this essay owns two of them.) Germany and the Czech Republic have issued both coins (which the author also owns) and stamps in Kafka’s honor, and Israel also has issued a stamp in his honor, honoring him and other greats such as Einstein and Freud. Nauru and Niue also have issued coins. For the author of this article, The Trial is his favorite book that he has read in his now rather long life, and he has read it multiple times.

Plot Summary and Running Commentary

The story of The Trial is rather convoluted and, like the novel, bizarre. It is briefly recounted here as a reminder for those who have read the book and as necessary background relevant to his essay for those who have not read it. The summary is accompanied by commentary, which of course represents only the author’s point of view. Other analyses can be found by Brod (1960), Camus (1955), Deleuze and Guattari (1986), Robertson (1985), and Sokel (2002), as well as in many other places. Some of these analyses are presented in the penultimate section of the article.

The novel is a story about Joseph (also spelled “Josef” in the original German) K., a chief clerk at a bank who appears to be well respected and regarded at his prestigious bank. On his 30th birthday, however, K. awakened to an unwelcome surprise. As is stated in the first sentence of the book, “Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning.” This sentence sets the stage for the rest of the novel, the large majority of which consists of K. trying to figure out why he was arrested and what he can do about it. He makes no progress on either count. His efforts often lead to worse rather than better outcomes for him.

The initial sentence sets the psychological theme for the entire novel. One morning, one can wake up and, suddenly, everything goes wrong for no discernible, or at least, rational reason. One may realize one has been betrayed, as in the case of Joseph K., or one may receive a threatening medical diagnosis, or one may be confronted with a past mistake one made that has ceased to be hidden, or one may find oneself unexpectedly on the brink of financial or other ruin. The message of The Trial seems to be that sudden catastrophe happened to Joseph K., and it can happen to you. It may be inexplicable: There may be no apparent reason for it at the time it occurs, or ever. The search for explanation may exhaust you without bringing you any closer either to an explanation or to any kind of succor from the catastrophe.

K. tried to find out what he was accused of, but the agents who arrested him, who were from what appears to be an extra-judicial, or perhaps a secret alternate-judicial system, claimed not to know. K. lived in a boarding house and, strangely, was brought into the room of another boarder (Fräulein [Miss] Bürstner) for interrogation. The Fräulein, who was out, appears to have had nothing to do with the court system, but whether she actually did or did not have a connection to the court is never fully made clear. Three lower-level clerks from K.’s bank inexplicably appeared and their status with respect to the strange judicial system is never clear either.

One sees a comical extra-judicial proceeding, the first of many in the book, against which K. wants to rebel, and about which he feels a desire, even an obligation, to rebel and set things right. And yet, the system, no matter how nonsensical and unfathomable, seems to hold all the power while K. holds little power or none at all, with his efforts to fight the system only enmeshing himself more deeply into it. And so it is with us all. One never knows, as with Fräulein Bürstner and the lower-level clerks, exactly who is merely an observer to the system and who is secretly part of it and perhaps a part of what appears to be a plot against oneself.

When Fräulein Bürstner finally returns, K. seeks some kind of help from her, but he then ruins any chances of help he might have had by passionately kissing her without her consent. Although he is rejected by her, he has hopes for his relationship with her in the future. Meanwhile, K.’s landlady, Frau Grubach, is vaguely aware of what is going on, and tries to console him after the arresting agents leave, but K. finds her not to be helpful—a theme of seemingly unhelpful “help” that recurs throughout the book.

We see in Joseph K., for the first time, a passionate act (kissing Fräulein Bürstner) growing out of desperation, but also an act of self-sabotage that cuts off a possible source of help. It will be the first of many acts of self-sabotage born out of K.’s feelings of desperation. Kafka allows us to recognize how K. has started himself down a path to ruin, but also invites us to reflect upon how, in desperate circumstances, we may, in a state of anxiety, depression, or utter desperation, sabotage ourselves and inadvertently make a bad situation worse.

K., although under arrest, was allowed freedom of movement. He could come and go more or less as he pleased. He received a summons to appear for a hearing on the upcoming Sunday but was given only an imprecise location and no particular time at which to appear. K. went to the given address but found there were many different apartments and entryways in a sketchy, run-down part of the city, and it is not at all clear where he was supposed to go. K. then made his way to the tenement in which the proceeding was to be held. He discovered that the proceeding would take place in the cramped, stuffy attic of the dilapidated tenement. The officials of the court turned out to be grotesque caricatures—otherwise preoccupied, incompetent, and pompous. K. explored various paths and ended up finally finding the correct chamber, which was in ill repair.

Kafka has placed the first proceeding in a shabby tenement attic in a decrepit part of the city. The proceeding was conducted by people who seemed to be almost as unserious and ill-behaved as they possibly could be, which suggested to K. that the whole proceeding could not be taken seriously. Understandably, he would have expected a serious legal proceeding to be conducted in a serious venue. But the setting underscores quite a different message—that this is a court that dispenses with all the usual visual and behavioral trappings of power but is no less powerful for having done so. On the contrary, the message seems to be the opposite—that it does not need those symbols designed to convey power to be powerful. In life, it can be the most seemingly despicable, least well behaved, ill-intentioned, and least seemingly worthy people embedded in an arbitrary, seemingly unjust and even depraved system, who hold power over our lives.

In the entire novel, there is no evidence, ever, that the officially-sanctioned state police force, military, court officers, or other agents of law-enforcement work with the extra-judicial court system. But K. never went to the police or any other governmental system to try to figure out whether they were in cahoots with the extra-judicial system, which itself had no apparent system of enforcement (until the end, when bizarre executioners came to visit him). We learn from Kafka the extent to which systems of oppression may be in our minds, a point made more recently by Sternberg et al. (2025) in their review of how autocrats fill our minds with false narratives. People learn in different ways (Zhang & Sternberg, 2002). In the novel, Joseph K. does not learn much from experience, but we learn a lot from his experience. We are oppressed, in part, because we allow ourselves to be oppressed instead of figuring out possibly effective ways of fighting against the oppressors. Joseph K. is oppressed by the society, but also by his limited imagination—in particular, his refusal to acknowledge and imagine any outcome of his case other than his being completely exonerated (Ross et al., 2023).

In the proceeding in the tenement, K.’s name was called and K. was rebuked for his lateness, despite his not having been given the time or exact place at which he was to appear. After some delay, finally, the proceeding got underway. He was first mistaken for a house painter, suggesting chaotic disorganization in the proceeding. K. gave a passionate speech on the falsity of the accusation that had been made without his even knowing what the accusation was about. He spoke passionately of the absurdity of the whole proceeding. K. was extremely critical of the court and the officers of the court. K. also mentioned that the officers of the court who arrested him were soliciting bribes. Through his obvious antagonism toward the court and its officers, K. managed only to antagonize the court. He learned nothing of value about the system beyond its utter absurdity and mendacity.

The ridiculousness of the situation is underscored by K.’s originally being identified as a house painter. In a normal court, K. might have hoped that the whole proceeding would have been based on a case of mistaken identity, but even if it was, it was he who was now caught up in the grinding wheels of the absurd system. K.’s vocal and passionate oratory against the system served not to give him the deliverance he sought, but rather only to make his situation worse. The most incompetent and egregious people, put in positions of power, want only flattery and obsequiousness, no matter how repulsive and repellent they may be to a normal set of human values. They may even take pride in the power to which their mediocrity has led them. We see this in governmental and other bureaucracies today. Indeed, the world today seems to be little or no different from the world of K. Put the worst people into power, and they will nevertheless demand the obsequiousness and flattery that principled people are loath to bestow upon them, a reluctance that only enrages the powerful in the system.

Kafka goes to great lengths to show the incompetence, indifference, and corruption of the extra-judicial system, a commentary on systems of oppression in Kafka’s time in Europe that is just as relevant to some living today in certain countries in the Americas. The systems seem, when they oppress people, to be hopeless. Yet they eventually do pass, whether in ancient Greece or Rome, or in the Europe of the Middle Ages, or in the Europe of World War II. How they pass is discussed later in this article. They do not pass, however, because of the kinds of reactions of individuals we see in The Trial. These reactions include (a) vague knowledge that the system exists but for the most part obliviousness to the system (that of most of the people in the story, such as Frau Grubach, the landlady); (b) attempts to work within the system (e.g., the artist Titorelli, who tries to help Joseph K.); (c) attempts at ingratiation (such as by Joseph K.’s lawyer), (d) collaboration with the corrupt system to further one’s own ambitions (the judges and officers of the court as well as officials at the bank where Joseph K. worked); (e) groveling to the system, as in the case of Block, another client of K.’s lawyer; and (f) active fighting for one’s cause in an aggressive but ultimately self-defeating way, as in the case of Joseph K. The situation is no different from any failed system today. There are plenty of ways to guarantee that nothing will change. People are very good at adaptation, but they are not so good at employing adaptive intelligence, which would be oriented not only toward their getting by, but also, toward making things better for future generations.

While the court proceeding was ongoing in the tenement, a washerwoman was sexually assaulted in a corner of the chamber. Ironically, perhaps, she was assaulted during the proceeding in her own house, which was the part of the tenement in which the proceeding occurred. No one came to her aid. K’s view that he was amidst some secret organization was reinforced when he noted that assembled members of the proceeding seemed to be wearing some sort of common lapel pin.

The attack on the washerwoman who owned the house showed the utter callousness of the people holding power and their flaunting of their disregard for normal values. One might hope that, under such systems, people would rebel; but instead, most people come to accept the system as the frightening normal. They are more concerned with their own self-preservation under such a system than with helping others. The lapel pin emphasized how people who seemed to have no particular dignity or credentials or right to power might nevertheless hold great power, and how the righteous person might find themselves on the outside against hard-to-pin down, scattered but somehow nevertheless unified oppressors and forces that bear down upon them. The incompetence, corruption, and degradation are not incidental to the story of the power of the Court: They are what the whole system is about, much as is true in many nations around the world today.

The next Sunday K. returned to the same place, only to discover that the court was not in session that day. He was shown around by the washerwoman whom he had met the week before, and who now attempted to seduce him, but he quickly discovered that she was viewed as the property of a law student who was on his way upward in the court system. The washerwoman’s husband, who was an usher in the court, gave K. a tour of the offices of the court. The visit ended up with K.’s knowing little more about the court system than he knew before he came.

K. learned on his second visit that even someone who was well-meaning and who tried to enlighten him had little to offer. No one had much knowledge of how the court system worked, perhaps including many, if not most who worked within it. They simply accepted it as it was. As is true in many nations today, intransparency is central to the workings of governance, as is the sense of entitlement that those within the system demonstrate, not despite, but rather because of their lack of competence. They are not embarrassed by their lack of competence but rather celebrate it. The governance does not consist of the best in the society, but the worst, and they revel in the power they hold because only incompetent and morally vacuous people would want to be part of, and will be retained by, such a system.

One day, K. entered a storage room in the bank at which K. worked. To his astonishment, he discovered there the two officers of the court who arrested him being flogged, apparently because of K.’s accusation that they had solicited bribes from him when they arrested him. K. tried to convince the flogger to let the men go, saying they should not be flogged; but the flogger was unpersuaded and continued flogging the men. K. then rushed out. The next day, K. returned and checked on the storage room, only to find the flogger was still there, flogging the two officers of the court. K. then fled.

The officers were being flogged solely on the basis of an unsubstantiated accusation (by K.), reminding us that everyone in the system can be punished, even those who are parts of it, merely on the basis of accusation without evidence or proof. No one is immune. That is what happened to K. as well, of course. An unsubstantiated accusation, the nature of which he never found out, was laid against him. And the fact that the flogging scene was the same the second day as the first served to underscore that the pursuit by the system goes on and on, endlessly repeating itself, and that injustice can be served even in the most improbable and undignified of places, such as a storage room in a bank.

The bank is undoubtedly complicit in the system, a reminder that those institutions that want to be able to do their job, or something resembling it, often buckle under, as has happened with major and prestigious law firms, media companies, and universities in the United States today. Indeed, such institutions may be the first to capitulate because they have the most to lose. We learn that this gutless, self-serving complicity may serve to create payoffs for selected individuals in the short-term, but will compromise everyone else in both the short- and long-terms.

Later, K. received a visit from his uncle Karl, who lived outside the city in the country. Karl had heard about the arrest and he now tried to convince K. to visit a lawyer who was a long-time acquaintance of Karl. K. did not want to see the lawyer, Herr Huld, but finally relented and went to see him. The door to the lawyer’s offices was opened by Leni, who worked for the lawyer and was also the lawyer’s mistress. K. and his uncle were admitted to the bedroom of the lawyer, who was lying down, ill and ill-disposed. K. listened to his uncle talk to the bedridden lawyer. As Uncle Karl talked to the lawyer, K. found himself getting bored and thinking about how pointless the whole meeting was. Leni called him away for the purpose of having sexual relations of some kind with him. K. was absorbed by this new opportunity and temporarily put out of his mind the meeting his uncle was then having with the lawyer. Eventually, Uncle Karl came out of the meeting with the lawyer and chastised K. for showing disrespect toward the lawyer by leaving the meeting and then, on top of it, becoming sexually involved with the lawyer’s mistress. The uncle suggested that K. had hurt his own case by behaving so badly. K. seemed to be indifferent. He was in the midst of acquiring learned helplessness.

The scene in the law offices shows that, to the extent that the system is attempting to grind down K., as it does others who have been accused, it is succeeding, as do so many autocratic or bureaucratic systems that lead people to mentally capitulate to them (Sternberg et al., 2025; Sternberg & Fischer, 2022). K. has lost focus and no longer could or even wanted to follow the discussion of his own case. He let himself be distracted by Leni, a distraction that only could serve him poorly, as he himself must have known. The scene with the lawyer made clear that the court worked by behind-the-scenes personal relationships, in which K. had no interest, especially given the apparent disarray in the lawyer’s office. But he was continuing on a road of self-sabotage, a road that ultimately would lead to his destruction.

As time went on, K. became more and more preoccupied and even fixated on his case. His work began to suffer. The Assistant Manager, seeing K. distracted, started sidling up to K.’s clients with the goal of stealing them away from K., and apparently had some success in doing so.

Those who fight the system might hope for help from others. But often what happens is that those who have not (yet) been attacked by the system join the system in bringing down those who have been attacked. Instead of helping those who are attacked, they often turn on them. One is reminded of the quotation by Martin Niemoller reminding us that when we do not speak up for those who are being attacked, one eventually will become one of the victims: “…Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me” (https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists).

K. continued to have contact with Huld but became convinced that Huld was doing nothing to help him win his case. K. also continued the sexual relationship with Leni. K. further became aware that another client of the lawyer, a merchant named Block, also was often present at Huld’s offices. But K. realized that Block had been reduced to a groveling man who shrank in front of Huld and prostrated himself before the lawyer. Block’s case had been going on for 5 years. During that time period, Block had been reduced from being a successful businessman to being nearly bankrupt and broken. Block had become like a slave to the lawyer and to Leni, the latter of whom appeared to be sexually involved with Block, as she had been with K. Huld mocked and denigrated Block in front of Joseph K. for the dog-like subservience Block showed. This experience of seeing what had happened to Block further convinced K. that the future with Huld would be bleak—that ultimately, he too would be reduced to groveling servitude.

K. saw what happened to those who tried to fight the system. They were ground down, as K. himself was already starting to be. They lost not only the respectable life they once had, but the soul that had kept them humanly intact through their trials in life. K. did not want to become Block—none of us wants to be reduced to such a level—but in The Trial, as in 1984 (Orwell, 1949), those who fight the system are defeated by it and stripped of their humanity, if not in one way, then in another.

Block confided to K. that, unknown to Huld, he had multiple pettifogging lawyers working on the case. His whole life appeared to have been taken over by his case. K. realized that this was what the lawyer wanted. K. then decided to discharge the lawyer. On a trip to see Huld, K. told Huld that he was fired. The lawyer assured K. that he had been working to good effect on K.’s case but K. was unconvinced and refused Huld’s entreaties to let him continue working on the case. K. disparaged Huld to his face. The lawyer warned K. that in discharging him, he was imperiling his case, but K. did not believe him, or at that point, did not care. Leni’s entreaties to stay with the lawyer also went unheard. K. decided he needed a different approach.

In firing Huld, K. has decided to forsake what unfortunately might have been his only route to negotiating with the system, albeit a route that would lead to his gradually losing whatever self-respect and apparent dignity he had left. His hope was that there might be another way to fight the system, but unfortunately, he had no idea what that might be. K.’s disparagement of Huld, however justified it may have seemed to K., was yet another step on the route to ultimate self-sabotage. Huld seemed to have little to offer, but K. stepped into the unknown, not knowing whether anyone else had anything much to offer either. K., like Odysseus, was handed a metaphorical choice between Scylla and Charybdis—all alternatives were bad, as is so often the case when untransparent, incompetent, but powerful forces rule our lives, whether destructive governments, destructive diseases, or powerful destructive forces of nature such as floods, fires, and storms.

At the bank, K. was informed by a manufacturer who was one of K’s clients at the bank that a painter, Titorelli, had connections to the court and might be able to help him. The manufacturer told K. that Titorelli was the court painter and so knew the judges and the workings of the court. K. went to see Titorelli, who lived in a tiny, messy, airless room in the attic of a dilapidated tenement, a tenement which, K. discovers, also housed court offices.

K. was offered what he believed to be hope, but his situation, like that of many people with Stage 4 cancer, was close to hopeless. He nevertheless needed to grasp at whatever straws were made available to him.

Titorelli assured K. that he, Titorelli, would be able, through his connections to the Court, to help K. He explained, however, that what he could not provide was a road to unequivocal acquittal, because such acquittal never happened to anyone who was charged by the court. K.’s only options were to seek either an ostensible acquittal or an indefinite postponement. Ostensible acquittal meant that the case was essentially put on hold but could be renewed at any time–meaning that K. might be rearrested at any time, including by the time he just got home from the proceeding of the court that ostensibly acquitted him. The other option, indefinite postponement, meant that the case remained active, but with the goal of trying to force it to move as slowly as possible so that it would not reach, or only very slowly would reach, higher levels of courts, which were apparently numerous. Titorelli could help with either of the latter two options, but he could not help with unequivocal acquittal because it was impossible to achieve in the court system that had ensnared K. Titorelli told K. that he understood that K. wanted to think about which option he wanted to pursue, but he warned K. not to think about it for too long. Titorelli sold K. some paintings—which K. bought just to get out of Titorelli’s cramped apartment and away from the scene. K. apparently had no intention of ever seeing Titorelli again. He just wanted out.

Titorelli presented K. with two choices, both of which were quite bad, but which were, according to Titorelli, all that were available to K. The choices were consistent with what K. must have been able to observe before—that there was, in a Sartrean (Sartre, 1989) sense, no exit, only the two possibilities for endlessly delaying the inevitable. K. discovered, as did Garcin, Serrano, and Rigault in No Exit, that “hell is other people,” in this case, not only those within the system who perpetuate it, but also those outside it who accept it, or at least, fail to resist it.

Soon thereafter, at work, K. was assigned to give an important Italian client of the bank a tour of the town. But he was told that the Italian client was busy and had decided he only wanted to see the cathedral. K. went to the cathedral, but the client never showed up. At the cathedral, K. came across a cleric who called K.’s name and introduced himself as the prison chaplain. The chaplain told K. a parable, “Before the Law.” In the story, a man spent his whole life trying to be admitted to the law, but failed to convince the doorkeeper to let him in. The doorkeeper assured the man that he could not be admitted to the law, and that even if he got past the doorkeeper, there would be many more higher-level doorkeepers who would not let K. past the gates. The man might have had the option of barging in past the doorkeeper, but he never tried. Instead, the man tried and tried to get into the Law by appeasing the gatekeeper, even bribing the gatekeeper in the hope he, the man, would be admitted to the law. The gatekeeper accepted the bribes, explaining to the man that he was accepting them only to show the man the futility of trying to get into the law. Finally, as the man was dying, the jailkeeper explained to the man that he, the gatekeeper, was now closing the door, a door that was meant only for the now-dying man. The man was not to be admitted to the Law, ever.

The chaplain explained to K. that, over the years, there had been many different interpretations of the parable, and that none of them was definitive. What seemed certain was that the doorkeeper, representing the court system, had no intention either of explaining the Law or of letting the man at the door have access to it. The chaplain also told K. that his case was going badly and that he needed to understand that his prospects were not good. The chaplain asked what he could do for K., but K. could not think of anything substantive and departed.

The visit with the chaplain is K.’s last chance, to the extent it is a chance at all. Things have been going slowly downhill and are now reaching an end. The chaplain seemed to be offering K. his help, but the chaplain himself was an agent of the court system and thus was as enmeshed in it as any of the other representatives of the court that K. had met. The most interesting aspect of the parable may be that the man before the Law always had the option of trying to barge through the gate, despite having been warned against it, but he was so ground down and so repeatedly assured that there was no hope through that gate—only more gates—that he did not even try to make his way past the gatekeeper. The man’s endless negotiations with the gatekeeper are a reminder of the impenetrability of the system—that nothing would get him to the Law and that he only would be left to rot, trying to get into a system that had already predetermined his fate, however it was to come about.

On the evening before K.’s 31st birthday, two grotesque, comical-looking men came to K’s apartment. They grabbed K. and walked him through the city, keeping him in a tight grip that did not allow K. to escape. K. believed he captured a brief glance of Fräulein Bürstner but he could not be sure it was her nor whether she had anything to do with the whole matter. Finally, the three men arrived at a quarry outside the city. The men partially undressed K., lay him down, and went through a ritual that ended with one of the men stabbing K. in the heart and the other choking him. K. commented, as his last words, that he had been executed “like a dog.”

There was no dignity for Joseph K. in death, only more indignity, leading him to die “like a dog,” as he put it. The executioners were as ridiculous as everyone else K. met in the court system, but no less powerful. We are reminded that systems that we are unable to understand, no matter how hard we try, and that frustrate us endlessly with their opacity and injustice, can toy with us until the end nears, giving us no hope of salvation, and then, ultimately, coming for us.

In one respect, The Trial might seem like just another dystopian novel, in the genre of such great novels such 1984 (Orwell, 1949), Brave New World (Huxley, 1932), Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury, 1953/2012), or The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood, 1985/1998). But there is a crucial difference. The Trial is not about life in some future or even past or present autocracy; it is about life today, anytime and anywhere. The point is that unknown and largely unknowable systems can play with us all the time, whether human-imposed systems (such as in The Trial) or natural systems (extreme weather events or serious ill-health). And we must do the best we can to live with and through them, never quite knowing what tomorrow will bring. Ultimately, we all will die and the best we can do is to get through life with whatever human dignity and self-respect we can muster. In the end, our efforts may come to little but, at least, we must try. That is what life is.

Analysis in Terms of the Theory of Adaptive Intelligence

The author of this article has read The Trial many times, and each time, prior to the present, he could not quite figure out what K. did wrong. But viewing the novel from the standpoint of possibility as filtered through a theory of adaptive intelligence, a better understanding became possible, even if that better understanding was not in any final sense “objectively correct.”

K. was very intelligent in a traditional sense of general intelligence (see, e.g., Deary, 2020; Gottfredson, 1997; Sackett et al., 2020). He had obtained the position of Chief Clerk at his major bank and appeared to be well regarded. He had assistant clerks working under him and was just below the executive levels of the bank. The position was earned: He had no apparent familial or other connections to the bank. Moreover, in facing the various obstacles that confronted him, he was highly analytical in figuring out, to the extent possible for the extremely limited information he possessed, what he was facing. And yet, K. went from being arrested to being executed in the space of a year, apparently an extremely short time for the disposition of a court proceeding in comparison with other accused individuals whom he met along the way. In general, cases could last years or even decades.

Adaptive intelligence is the ability to adapt to the environment in a way that looks out not only for oneself in the present, but for others as well as oneself in the present and future as well (Sternberg, 2021a). Adaptive intelligence takes into account that it is not “intelligent” to destroy the world, in the short- or long- term, for the sake of short-term personal gains. Such a destructive mentality can create a situation, over time, where one’s long-term prospects become worse, and so do everyone else’s.

Surprisingly, in terms of adaptive intelligence and creating possibilities with it, K. made little effort to figure out who was part of the system, who was aware of it but indifferent toward it, and who might have been able to join him in fighting it. In some ways, he was the opposite of the consummately intelligent and observant Sherlock Holmes in the Arthur Conan Doyle novels. Joseph K. sought clues in his environment but observed almost nothing in that environment. The allies he found were mostly by happenstance, rather than through efforts to locate and recruit other individuals who might have joined him in fighting the system.

K.’s utter failure in fighting the system shows that general intelligence is also general in the sense that it is generally useless when it comes to fighting corruption (Sternberg, 2025). One can use general intelligence just as much to promote as to combat corruption, and that is what happens in the world of The Trial. K. fails adequately to show adaptive intelligence, and many of the people in the novel, as in the present-day world, use their intelligence to contribute to the corruption and desecration of the system to further their own selfish ends. If what we mean by “intelligence” is general intelligence, it can be very useful, but in ways that can make life worse for everyone, and even for oneself. It often is not adaptive for the world, or even for oneself in the long-term.

A principle in the theory of adaptive intelligence (Sternberg, 2021a) is that sabotage to one’s possibilities in life often starts with oneself. Joseph K. was almost the ultimate self-saboteur, antagonizing many people around him, and even leaving an appointment with his lawyer to sleep with the lawyer’s mistress, scarcely an effective way to get the lawyer to fight for him.

The question therefore arises as to what, precisely, K. did wrong, if indeed he did anything wrong. The answer, in terms of a theory of adaptive intelligence (Sternberg, 2021a), is that he did practically everything wrong. Consider elements of the theory of adaptive intelligence as they apply to K.’s predicament.

Other Traditions of Analysis

There are many philosophical and psychological points of view besides the present one from which The Trial might be understood. Consider just a few such analyses.

An existential analysis, such as that of Camus (1955), focuses on the meaninglessness of life, guilt without any clear or even knowable cause, and the ultimate irrationality of the universe. Kafka seems, indeed, to emphasize the irrationality of the bizarre and nightmarish sequence of events. In the Camusian existential tradition, the court that accuses and ultimately condemns K. may be seen as a metaphor for the absurdity of human life and the conditions surrounding it. But by accepting the futility of existence, one consigns oneself and others, like Sisyphus, to a kind of hell from which one cannot escape. If one believes one cannot escape, one therefore often does not even try. Joseph K. at least tried to fight the system, albeit utterly ineffectually.

A theological interpretation was offered by Kafka’s best friend and literary executor, Max Brod (1960). Brod believed that the court symbolized divine judgment and the inaccessibility of grace. In this case, the Law to which the man in the parable “Before the Law” was not admitted might be seen as representing the absolute, unreachable, and unknowable nature of God. This interpretation might seem contrary to what actually happens in the book. The court system does not have any of the characteristics we associate with heaven, paradise, or the divine; rather, it is a system of arbitrary and viselike oppression. To interpret the book as divine judgment at work is an extreme and possibly unjustified stretch. Brod knew Kafka personally, so he might have known something that other critics have not known; but the theological interpretation has generally not been taken up by others in contemporary criticism.

An interpretation has also been proposed in terms of a modernity in which bureaucracy in government has, in some cases, gone amiss and become monstrous and impenetrable (Arendt, 1944, 1982). A similar bureaucratic state is found in The Castle (Kafka, 1930/1958). This interpretation might view the novel as a devastating critique of modern governmental, legal, and other bureaucratic systems dominated by blind administrative power and depersonalized, unknowable authority. In such a view, the Law is everywhere but nowhere because it is all-powerful and omnipresent. At the same time, it is unjust and arbitrary, and so results in blind obedience rather than in justice. We live in a world based not on morality or on true justice, but rather on bureaucracy and unknowable procedural hurdles piled one on top of another. From the standpoint of adaptive intelligence, our job then is to fight the mindless bureaucratic system—to make the world better rather than to accept the futility of the bureaucracy and all it represents.

A psychoanalytic interpretation of the novel is that K.’s situation is an externalization of his own psyche. Indeed, the whole proceeding may merely represent what was going on in K.’s head. In this case, K. would be fighting himself, or rather, his id and ego would be fighting his superego. Although this interpretation may seem dubious, it does seem very likely that at the same time Joseph K. was fighting the system, he was fighting within himself a variety of id-like impulses. some of those impulses, such as his dalliance with Leni and his tendency to belittle those who tried to help him, worked against him in his fight against the court. The fight against the court system is a fight we all endure against our internalized model of society’s expectations, no matter how accurate or inaccurate that model may be (see Kashyap, 2023). K.’s interactions with the world may have driven him into a psychotic state. But if this “it’s all in the head” interpretation is correct, and there is no strong reason in the actual text to suggest that it is, Joseph K. then failed to do proper battle with the forces beating down on himself, whether they were internal to himself or external to him. In fact, we do not have to be prey to our own unconscious.

Another analysis that is Marxist in nature is that of Benjamin (1978). This analysis emphasizes the hidden totalitarian state in which K. lives. It asserts that K.’s despair stems from his confrontation with an all-dominating, capitalist, dictatorial state. Indeed, much of what is described in The Trial seems to be the same kind of scarcely hidden oppression against which Marx rebelled. K. is a victim of a crushing socioeconomic system that is heading toward collapse. All this may be true, but K.’s reactions to that totalitarian state are inadequate, guaranteeing that he will fail to combat it, right from the start of his confrontation with it. One cannot defeat a totalitarian state by bending to its will, but neither can one defeat it without adaptively intelligent strategizing, which Joseph K. never does.

There is and will be no one “definitive” analysis of The Trial, not today and not ever. Kafka never told us what the novel meant and, as he is deceased, never will. As is the case for “Before the Law,” we are all left to interpret it as we see fit. The book is prism-like in the sense that looking at it from different angles, one can see many different things. But although the interpretations are numerous and varied, the future, according to the book, is not. As the usher (husband of the washerwoman) said, “Yet as a rule all our cases are foregone conclusions” (p. 77).

Possibilities in The Trial: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Trial is, in most respects, a profoundly distressing book. Joseph K. is warned from the beginning that he has no real chance of acquittal, and his only sensible option is to delay the inevitable. He chooses to fight but loses in what appears to be record time, at least as the trials in his world went. He is executed. And yet….the book contains hints, if only indirect, of different possibilities—of what he might have done differently. To summarize these possibilities, and their fit into the framework of the theory of adaptive intelligence (Sternberg, 2021a) and of transformational intelligence (Sternberg, 2021c)—the use of intelligence to make the world a better place—consider the following summarization:

There are other possibilities as well. The issue is that Joseph K. sealed his fate by failing in the use of his adaptive intelligence to create possibilities other than certain conviction. He plunged toward his own extinction, fighting in patently ineffectual ways to achieve change that was not possibly going to come unless he set his mind to how he effectively could create it. Adaptive intelligence is not simply about “abilities.” It is also about attitudes. And his own attitude of focusing only on saving himself by seeking self-serving, one-sided alliances did him in.

Conclusion

In The Trial, the authorities are unaccountable and, as far as the reader can tell, irrational, self-serving, and even vindictive. In the real world, they often are the same. Many of them seem to be this way in the United States at the time this article is being written (mid-2026). There is little or no accountability and the system of checks and balances has failed spectacularly. But that is the system that the United States has right now, and the systems in other autocratic, near-autocratic, or evolving-autocratic countries are probably no better and likely much worse. One can try to change them, but merely insisting that they be changed and insulting those who work under those systems is not an effective way of changing things. It did not work for K. and will not work for us.

In terms of the analytical executive processes (metacomponents) of the theory of adaptive intelligence, K. was not successful. He misdefined the problem he faced, he misrepresented the problem as one that was solvable through a final acquittal, his strategies led him to ruin, and he failed adequately to see he was on the wrong track. He never figured out what he truly needed to do to save himself, and perhaps others as well.

K. did not know the structure of the system or who was really in charge. It was not possible for him to find out. But he would not accept these facts. He did not accept that trials can last for years and even decades and that an extended proceeding was the best one could do—either protraction of the proceeding or a kind of conditional acquittal. He did not accept that the system endlessly repeated itself, as did the flogging he witnessed, so that all one could do was keep the wheels spinning and grinding on, in the highly imperfect, seemingly senseless, and apparently unjust system in which he lived. The whipping went on, and so did the trials of those whom the system accused. He did not accept that the only way to move his case to a better place was through personal relationships of others with court officials, not through passionately but vainly arguing his case in court. “The most important thing was counsel’s personal connection with officials of the Court; in that lay the chief value of the Defense” (p. 146). The lawyer had those connections and relationships; K. did not. K. fired the lawyer, nevertheless.

K. did not accept that his best strategy was actually a more passive one—of letting those with the personal relationships do the work—and K. tried instead to fight a court system that would only fight him back with more power than he could muster. He refused to show the bare minimum of practical intelligence, leaving a meeting with the lawyer and becoming sexually involved with Leni who, however much she may have wanted to be with him, was nevertheless the lawyer’s mistress. And most important of all, he refused to accept that his innocence or guilt was irrelevant in the court system, and that insisting upon his innocence was worse than useless as a strategy, as it only antagonized those who hold his fate in their hands.

The atmosphere in Titorelli’s studio suffocated him. That atmosphere was symbolic of an entire suffocating system. He left Titorelli’s studio, deciding that he would never return to such an unpleasant place. But his whole world was unpleasant, and he really had no choice.

When the prison chaplain told him that there were endless interpretations of the parable, “Before the Law,” with no certainty ever, that was a metaphor for the world in which K. was living. But K. wanted the certainty of absolute acquittal, and it simply was not possible for him. K. wanted sense in a nonsensical world.

In the end, there was no final proceeding, no written or spoken verdict of which he was made aware, no explanation of what crime he was supposed to have committed, and no justice to be served. When he was put to death, one executioner stabbed him and the other suffocated him. The fate he feared most had befallen him.

Alexei Navalny died alone, in Russia, as a hero of principles for trying to create a more nearly just and better society (Skopeliti, 2024). K. died alone, however, only trying to make things better for himself, and in the process, making them worse. Navalny chose one way; K., in the novel, chose another. Navalny’s death was noted around the world; K. died alone and unnoted. But K. has been immortalized by Kafka as an example of the utter senselessness in which we live and die, and of how hard it is to do anything to make the senseless anything more manageable than it is.

Joseph K. started out as a rational, logical, basically independent and adaptively functioning individual. He, like others (such as Block, in the novel), became obsessed with his case. In the end, he ended up being utterly beaten down by the system and, when taken by his executioners, he was resigned to his fate. He fought and failed. We all can learn from his failure—just in case we wish to learn—to accept what is possible, and to understand that an important part of wisdom is recognizing what just is not possible in the highly imperfect world in which we all live. We learn the relationship between adaptive intelligence and possibility is knowing what is possible and how to achieve it and knowing what is not possible at a given time and place and not wasting effort on seeking to achieve the impossible (see V. P. Glăveanu, 2023; V. Glăveanu, 2024). We also learn that general intelligence, of the kind K. had in abundance, is not the kind of intelligence that is sufficient to get us through the vagaries and vicissitudes of adapting to an often-Kafkaesque world. We need in addition the broader range of adaptive intelligence and the creative, practical, and wisdom-based skills that go with it.