The Trial by Franz Kafka: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download

Modernist fiction · 1925

The Trial

By Franz Kafka · (Published 1925) · All Franz Kafka books

Word Count ~87,000 words (estimated)

Reading Time Approx. 4.8 hours (estimated)

Copyright Status Public Domain in the US; check local laws

Source Project Gutenberg #7849

Source Edition Project Gutenberg #7849

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One: Arrest—Conversation with Mrs. Grubach—Then Miss Bürstner

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. Every day at eight in the morning he was brought his breakfast by Mrs. Grubach’s cook—Mrs. Grubach was his landlady—but today she didn’t come. That had never happened before. K. waited a little while, looked from his pillow at the old woman who lived opposite and who was watching him with an inquisitiveness quite unusual for her, and finally, both hungry and disconcerted, rang the bell. There was immediately a knock at the door and a man entered. He had never seen the man in this house before. He was slim but firmly built, his clothes were black and close-fitting, with many folds and pockets, buckles and buttons and a belt, all of which gave the impression of being very practical but without making it very clear what they were actually for. “Who are you?” asked K., sitting half upright in his bed. The man, however, ignored the question as if his arrival simply had to be accepted, and merely replied, “You rang?” “Anna should have brought me my breakfast,” said K. He tried to work out who the man actually was, first in silence, just through observation and by thinking about it, but the man didn’t stay still to be looked at for very long. Instead he went over to the door, opened it slightly, and said to someone who was clearly standing immediately behind it, “He wants Anna to bring him his breakfast.” There was a little laughter in the neighbouring room, it was not clear from the sound of it whether there were several people laughing. The strange man could not have learned anything from it that he hadn’t known already, but now he said to K., as if making his report “It is not possible.” “It would be the first time that’s happened,” said K., as he jumped out of bed and quickly pulled on his trousers. “I want to see who that is in the next room, and why it is that Mrs. Grubach has let me be disturbed in this way.” It immediately occurred to him that he needn’t have said this out loud, and that he must to some extent have acknowledged their authority by doing so, but that didn’t seem important to him at the time. That, at least, is how the stranger took it, as he said, “Don’t you think you’d better stay where you are?” “I want neither to stay here nor to be spoken to by you until you’ve introduced yourself.” “I meant it for your own good,” said the stranger and opened the door, this time without being asked. The next room, which K. entered more slowly than he had intended, looked at first glance exactly the same as it had the previous evening. It was Mrs. Grubach’s living room, over-filled with furniture, tablecloths, porcelain and photographs. Perhaps there was a little more space in there than usual today, but if so it was not immediately obvious, especially as the main difference was the presence of a man sitting by the open window with a book from which he now looked up. “You should have stayed in your room! Didn’t Franz tell you?” “And what is it you want, then?” said K., looking back and forth between this new acquaintance and the one named Franz, who had remained in the doorway. Through the open window he noticed the old woman again, who had come close to the window opposite so that she could continue to see everything. She was showing an inquisitiveness that really made it seem like she was going senile. “I want to see Mrs. Grubach …,” said K., making a movement as if tearing himself away from the two men—even though they were standing well away from him—and wanted to go. “No,” said the man at the window, who threw his book down on a coffee table and stood up. “You can’t go away when you’re under arrest.” “That’s how it seems,” said K. “And why am I under arrest?” he then asked. “That’s something we’re not allowed to tell you. Go into your room and wait there. Proceedings are underway and you’ll learn about everything all in good time. It’s not really part of my job to be friendly towards you like this, but I hope no-one, apart from Franz, will hear about it, and he’s been more friendly towards you than he should have been, under the rules, himself. If you carry on having as much good luck as you have been with your arresting officers then you can reckon on things going well with you.” K. wanted to sit down, but then he saw that, apart from the chair by the window, there was nowhere anywhere in the room where he could sit. “You’ll get the chance to see for yourself how true all this is,” said Franz and both men then walked up to K. They were significantly bigger than him, especially the second man, who frequently slapped him on the shoulder. The two of them felt K.’s nightshirt, and said he would now have to wear one that was of much lower quality, but that they would keep the nightshirt along with his other underclothes and return them to him if his case turned out well. “It’s better for you if you give us the things than if you leave them in the storeroom,” they said. “Things have a tendency to go missing in the storeroom, and after a certain amount of time they sell things off, whether the case involved has come to an end or not. And cases like this can last a long time, especially the ones that have been coming up lately. They’d give you the money they got for them, but it wouldn’t be very much as it’s not what they’re offered for them when they sell them that counts, it’s how much they get slipped on the side, and things like that lose their value anyway when they get passed on from hand to hand, year after year.” K. paid hardly any attention to what they were saying, he did not place much value on what he may have still possessed or on who decided what happened to them. It was much more important to him to get a clear understanding of his position, but he could not think clearly while these people were here, the second policeman’s belly—and they could only be policemen—looked friendly enough, sticking out towards him, but when K. looked up and saw his dry, bony face it did not seem to fit with the body. His strong nose twisted to one side as if ignoring K. and sharing an understanding with the other policeman. What sort of people were these? What were they talking about? What office did they belong to? K. was living in a free country, after all, everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld, who was it who dared accost him in his own home. He was always inclined to take life as lightly as he could, to cross bridges when he came to them, pay no heed for the future, even when everything seemed under threat. But here that did not seem the right thing to do. He could have taken it all as a joke, a big joke set up by his colleagues at the bank for some unknown reason, or also perhaps because today was his thirtieth birthday, it was all possible of course, maybe all he had to do was laugh in the policemen’s face in some way and they would laugh with him, maybe they were tradesmen from the corner of the street, they looked like they might be—but he was nonetheless determined, ever since he first caught sight of the one called Franz, not to lose any slight advantage he might have had over these people. There was a very slight risk that people would later say he couldn’t understand a joke, but—although he wasn’t normally in the habit of learning from experience—he might also have had a few unimportant occasions in mind when, unlike his more cautious friends, he had acted with no thought at all for what might follow and had been made to suffer for it. He didn’t want that to happen again, not this time at least; if they were play-acting he would act along with them.

He still had time. “Allow me,” he said, and hurried between the two policemen through into his room. “He seems sensible enough,” he heard them say behind him. Once in his room, he quickly pulled open the drawer of his writing desk, everything in it was very tidy but in his agitation he was unable to find the identification documents he was looking for straight away. He finally found his bicycle permit and was about to go back to the policemen with it when it seemed to him too petty, so he carried on searching until he found his birth certificate. Just as he got back in the adjoining room the door on the other side opened and Mrs. Grubach was about to enter. He only saw her for an instant, for as soon as she recognised K. she was clearly embarrassed, asked for forgiveness and disappeared, closing the door behind her very carefully. “Do come in,” K. could have said just then. But now he stood in the middle of the room with his papers in his hand and still looking at the door which did not open again. He stayed like that until he was startled out of it by the shout of the policeman who sat at the little table at the open window and, as K. now saw, was eating his breakfast. “Why didn’t she come in?” he asked. “She’s not allowed to,” said the big policeman. “You’re under arrest, aren’t you?” “But how can I be under arrest? And how come it’s like this?” “Now you’re starting again,” said the policeman, dipping a piece of buttered bread in the honeypot. “We don’t answer questions like that.” “You will have to answer them,” said K. “Here are my identification papers, now show me yours and I certainly want to see the arrest warrant.” “Oh, my God!” said the policeman. “In a position like yours, and you think you can start giving orders, do you. It won’t do you any good to get us on the wrong side, even if you think it will—we’re probably more on your side that anyone else you know!” “That’s true, you know, you’d better believe it,” said Franz, holding a cup of coffee in his hand which he did not lift to his mouth but looked at K. in a way that was probably meant to be full of meaning but could not actually be understood. K. found himself, without intending it, in a mute dialogue with Franz, but then slapped his hand down on his papers and said, “Here are my identity documents.” “And what do you want us to do about it?” replied the big policeman, loudly. “The way you’re carrying on, it’s worse than a child. What is it you want? Do you want to get this great, bloody trial of yours over with quickly by talking about ID and arrest warrants with us? We’re just coppers, that’s all we are. Junior officers like us hardly know one end of an ID card from another, all we’ve got to do with you is keep an eye on you for ten hours a day and get paid for it. That’s all we are. Mind you, what we can do is make sure that the high officials we work for find out just what sort of person it is they’re going to arrest, and why he should be arrested, before they issue the warrant. There’s no mistake there. Our authorities as far as I know, and I only know the lowest grades, don’t go out looking for guilt among the public; it’s the guilt that draws them out, like it says in the law, and they have to send us police officers out. That’s the law. Where d’you think there’d be any mistake there?” “I don’t know this law,” said K. “So much the worse for you, then,” said the policeman. “It’s probably exists only in your heads,” said K., he wanted, in some way, to insinuate his way into the thoughts of the policemen, to re-shape those thoughts to his benefit or to make himself at home there. But the policeman just said dismissively, “You’ll find out when it affects you.” Franz joined in, and said, “Look at this, Willem, he admits he doesn’t know the law and at the same time insists he’s innocent.” “You’re quite right, but we can’t get him to understand a thing,” said the other. K. stopped talking with them; do I, he thought to himself, do I really have to carry on getting tangled up with the chattering of base functionaries like this?—and they admit themselves that they are of the lowest position. They’re talking about things of which they don’t have the slightest understanding, anyway. It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves. I just need few words with someone of the same social standing as myself and everything will be incomparably clearer, much clearer than a long conversation with these two can make it. He walked up and down the free space in the room a couple of times, across the street he could see the old woman who, now, had pulled an old man, much older than herself, up to the window and had her arms around him. K. had to put an end to this display, “Take me to your superior,” he said. “As soon as he wants to see you. Not before,” said the policeman, the one called Willem. “And now my advice to you,” he added, “is to go into your room, stay calm, and wait and see what’s to be done with you. If you take our advice, you won’t tire yourself out thinking about things to no purpose, you need to pull yourself together as there’s a lot that’s going to required of you. You’ve not behaved towards us the way we deserve after being so good to you, you forget that we, whatever we are, we’re still free men and you’re not, and that’s quite an advantage. But in spite of all that we’re still willing, if you’ve got the money, to go and get you some breakfast from the café over the road.”

Without giving any answer to this offer, K. stood still for some time. Perhaps, if he opened the door of the next room or even the front door, the two of them would not dare to stand in his way, perhaps that would be the simplest way to settle the whole thing, by bringing it to a head. But maybe they would grab him, and if he were thrown down on the ground he would lose all the advantage he, in a certain respect, had over them. So he decided on the more certain solution, the way things would go in the natural course of events, and went back in his room without another word either from him or from the policemen.

The arrest has already begun, and nobody will explain it. Download the complete novel to follow K.’s case to its last page.

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Further Reading

Two more books of the accused conscience

Free edition

Metamorphosis

By Franz Kafka · a man who wakes up as an insect

Free edition

Notes from the Underground

By Fyodor Dostoevsky · the underground man’s confession

The Trial by Franz Kafka: Summary, Characters & Themes

This summary and analysis of The Trial follows the novel through its ten chapters, from the morning two men arrive in Josef K.’s lodgings and place him under an arrest they cannot explain, to the night a year later when two other men walk him out to a quarry. Kafka’s method is to hold the camera close and withhold the explanations and the verdict alike. Scenes are built out of doorways, waiting rooms and stairwells; conversations are almost entirely procedural; and the narrator reports what K. says and does without ever telling us what the court is, who runs it, or whether the charge is real. The effect is comic before it is frightening, and the comedy never stops. K. is a competent official with a high opinion of his own reasoning, and the novel lets him reason beautifully, at length, to people who have no authority to answer him.

The author is Franz Kafka, and the text of The Trial itself has a long critical history. The manuscript Kafka left behind in June 1924 was a bundle of chapters with no settled order, and Max Brod’s edition of 1925 fixed the sequence readers still use: the arrest, the first hearing in a tenement attic, the empty courtroom, the flogging in a bank storeroom, the lawyer, the painter, the cathedral, the end. Brod also supplied the note that closes chapter eight, “This chapter was left unfinished”, which is the most honest sentence in the book’s apparatus. What the order gives us is a shape: K. moves outward from his rooms into a city that turns out to be one continuous office, then inward again, until the last chapter leaves him in a quarry with his arms spread. Quotations here follow David Wyllie’s English, which keeps Kafka’s colloquial flatness — “coppers”, “you bunch of louts”, “that’s all we are” — instead of lifting the dialogue toward allegory or apology.

The engine of the book is the parable of the doorkeeper, which the prison chaplain tells K. in the cathedral and which Kafka had already published on its own. A man from the country asks for entry to the law; the doorkeeper says it is possible but not now, and the man waits his whole life at a door that was “meant only for you”. K.’s response — “So the doorkeeper cheated the man” — is the response of a rationalist who wants a crime he can name. The priest’s answer is worse: “you don’t need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary.” That sentence is the court in miniature. It does not need K. to be guilty; it needs him to keep standing at the door, asking for documents. The doorkeeper closes it at the end, and that is the worst moment. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground had already shown Kafka how a man can argue himself into exactly such a corner.

K.’s defence is an activity, and the novel is very funny about it. He plans a petition describing his whole life; he hires Dr. Huld, who explains that “defence is not really allowed under the law, it’s only tolerated”; he consults Titorelli, who offers three outcomes and admits that “there’s no more than a hair’s breadth of difference between the advantages and disadvantages”. The women he enlists belong to the same strategy. He kisses Fräulein Bürstner “like a thirsty animal lapping with its tongue”, lets Leni draw him away from the lawyer’s sickbed, and observes without irony that he is “accumulating women to help me”. Each of them is already inside the court’s economy; none can produce the document he wants. The help is real, the information is real, and it is all useless in the end. The animal note returns on the last page — “Like a dog!” — and Kafka’s Metamorphosis is the other place he works that note to the bone.

The book’s afterlife has been unusually noisy, and unusually productive. “Kafkaesque” now means any bureaucracy that cannot explain itself, which is both a tribute and a thinning: the novel is funnier, more physical and more theological than the adjective suggests. It has been read as a prophecy of the police state, as a Gnostic parable, as a satire of Habsburg Prague, and as the record of a man who could not marry. None of those readings needs the others to be wrong. What survives them is the last page, where K. dies and the shame is his own, and where the novel refuses to say whether the court was ever real. If you want the nineteenth-century novel that stands closest to this one, The Idiot shares its appetite for a good man destroyed by other people’s procedures. The text used here is the Project Gutenberg transcription (#7849), which is in the public domain in the United States.

Historical Context

Kafka began The Trial in the late summer of 1914, weeks after the war broke out and a few months after he had broken off his engagement to Felice Bauer for the first time. He worked at it in bursts through the winter, read chapters aloud to friends, and then stopped; by 1915 he had turned to other stories and the novel lay in folders. The dating matters because the machinery is not abstract. Kafka worked for an institute that assessed industrial accidents, so he knew the language of files, appeals and jurisdictions from the inside, and he had spent years negotiating with his family about work, marriage and money. The court in the novel owns no building. It borrows courtrooms, attics and rented rooms, the way an institution borrows the ordinary life of the person it is processing.

Kafka died of tuberculosis in June 1924, aged forty, leaving instructions that his manuscripts should be destroyed. Max Brod, his friend and literary executor, did the opposite. He assembled the novel for the Berlin publisher Die Schmiede and brought it out in 1925, a year after Kafka’s death, with the chapters in an order he chose himself. The manuscript held ten chapters, the eighth unfinished; Brod printed it with a note saying so, and he placed the cathedral chapter ninth, so that the parable sits immediately before the execution. Readers have argued about that order ever since — some would put the cathedral last, some would cut chapters altogether — but every translation, this one included, follows Brod’s sequence, because it is the only sequence with a shape, and a novel about procedure needs one.

David Wyllie’s English, the text printed here, is plain, colloquial and unsentimental, and the title page of this EPUB carries his translation copyright. The first English version, by Willa and Edwin Muir in 1937, had made the novel a religious allegory for anglophone readers, a reading that travelled with Brod’s own account of Kafka as a theologian of grace. Later translators moved the other way, toward the comic and the bureaucratic. The difference is audible on the first page: Wyllie lets a policeman say “We’re just coppers, that’s all we are”, and lets K. call the court “you bunch of louts”. The comedy is not an interpretation imposed from outside; it is what the German is doing, and the plainness makes the cruelty easier to see. It is the translation this edition prints, and the one to read first.

Key Characters & Literary Archetypes

• Josef K.: is thirty at the start and thirty-one at the end, a bank clerk who believes that a reasonable man can settle anything by explaining it. He demands the warrant, produces his birth certificate, drafts a petition about his whole life, and tells the examining judge that “there are proceedings only if I acknowledge that there are”. His energy is real and his arguments are good, which is the joke: the court feeds on exactly that supply. He dies without ever learning the charge, and the shame is the last thing he feels.
• Fräulein Bürstner: is the typist in the next room, and the first person K. tries to recruit. He waits behind her door until half past eleven, apologises for the furniture, then restages his arrest at her bedside table, shouting “Josef K.!” until a neighbour knocks. She is polite, tired, half-asleep and entirely unimpressed, and she calls his performance insulting when he offers to have the landlady vouch for him. She reappears at the end, or seems to, crossing the square while K. is being walked out to the quarry, though it may not be her.
• Leni: is Dr. Huld’s assistant, round-faced, with “dark, slightly bulging eyes” and a quick laugh, and the novel’s most disturbing study in help. She smashes a plate to get K. out of the sickroom, shows him the painting of a judge who “had himself made to look bigger”, and tells him the only defence is confession: “you have to confess”. She has a webbed hand she calls a “pretty claw”, keeps the key to the door, and takes K. down on the carpet while her employer lies listening in the next room, and gets up without hurrying.
• Titorelli: is the court painter, reached through a quarter of rats, yellow steam and girls who own a key to his door. He paints judges and the figure of Justice, who in his picture also has wings on her heels and is therefore “the figure of justice and the goddess of victory all in one”. He explains the three outcomes — absolute acquittal, apparent acquittal, deferment — with the calm of a man selling landscapes, and sells K. three identical moorland views, which K. locks in a desk drawer and never looks at again.
• Block: is the cereal merchant who has been Dr. Huld’s client for five years and has given up his business, his flat and his dignity for the case. He sleeps in the maid’s room so that he can be summoned, carries a briefcase of dates, and submits to being made to kneel and kiss the lawyer’s hand: “I’m kneeling now, Dr. Huld, sir.” When K. calls him a dog, the novel has already shown us the collar. He is what K. is becoming, shown without flattery and without much pity, which is why he is unbearable.
• The prison chaplain: appears in the empty cathedral, calls “Josef K.!” from a side pulpit, and tells K. that his case is going badly: “You are considered guilty.” He is the only official in the book who explains anything, and what he explains is the parable of the doorkeeper. His counsel is not comfort — “you don’t need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary” — and when K. asks who he is, the answer removes the last hope of appeal: “The court doesn’t want anything from you.”

Core Literary Themes

• Guilt as a procedure, not a fact: The court does not investigate K.; it produces him. Willem’s speech in the first chapter states the theory outright: the authorities “don’t go out looking for guilt among the public; it’s the guilt that draws them out, like it says in the law”. Everything that follows is consistent with that. No indictment is read, no evidence gathered, no verdict announced, and yet by the cathedral K. is told his guilt is “seen as proven”. Kafka’s insight is that accusation is a social process with its own momentum, and that a man who answers it has already joined it, whatever he says. The politics follow: nobody here can be innocent, because innocence is not a status the procedure issues.
• The architecture of the law: Kafka gives the court no headquarters, only addresses: a tenement attic, a corridor with a sign in a child’s handwriting, a storeroom at the bank, a painter’s studio in the poorest quarter. The geography is the argument. “There are court offices in almost every attic,” Titorelli says, and the sentence turns the whole city into an office block. K. is always climbing stairs, waiting in corridors, or losing his way in the dark; the law is not a building you can leave but a set of thresholds you keep crossing. The cathedral, the one monumental interior in the book, is empty when K. arrives and stays empty until the priest speaks from a side pulpit.
• Self-defence as confession: K.’s best weapon is his own eloquence, and it works against him every time. His speech at the first hearing — that the court is “some enormous organisation … perhaps even executioners and torturers” — is accurate and useless, because it accepts the court’s existence and asks it to be reasonable. Leni names the trap: “there’s nothing you can do to defend yourself from this court, you have to confess.” The priest puts it more coldly when K. protests his innocence: “That is true, but that is how the guilty speak.” The novel’s cruellest move is to make sincerity indistinguishable from evidence, and to let K. be sincere every time.
• Women, help and the economy of the case: Every woman in the novel is inside the court before K. meets her: the usher’s wife is paid in silk stockings, Leni serves the lawyer, Bürstner is about to start work in a legal office. K. treats them as channels to the men in charge, and the novel shows the cost of that. He gets information, sex and sympathy, and no acquittal. “Women have a lot of power,” he tells the priest. “In a court like this that seems to consist of nothing but woman-chasers.” The joke is on him: the women can move him around the board, but only the board’s rules apply, and the board has no interest in the pieces.
• Shame, animals and the body: Kafka keeps returning to physical humiliation — the nightshirt taken away, the sea-sickness in the attic, the prisoner screaming like “an instrument that was being tortured”, the flies tearing their legs off the flypaper. The body keeps registering what the mind refuses. That is why the last sentence is not about justice but about shame: “Like a dog!” he says, “it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.” The animal comparison is the book’s final verdict on a man who spent a year trying to be a person with a case, and the shame is not the court’s but his own, which is the one thing the court never claimed.

Related on editions.ink: The Castle of Otranto — a castle, a prophecy and an heir who is never quite there; Metamorphosis — the other Kafka waking nightmare, written ten years earlier; Notes from the Underground — Dostoevsky’s confession from below the floorboards.

Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Trial?

This edition gives you the complete novel in a clean, reflowable text: all ten chapters, from the two policemen in K.’s bedroom to the quarry outside the city, with Brod’s chapter titles kept as he set them. Nothing is abridged, modernised or annotated in the body of the book, so the sequence reads the way the 1925 edition printed it, including the note that closes chapter eight and tells you, in six words, that the manuscript stops there. The apparatus stays out of the way until you want it.

The files are DRM-free and come in three formats from a single page: EPUB for most readers, AZW3 for older Kindles, and KEPUB for Kobo devices. Each has real chapter marks and a linked table of contents, which matters in a book built out of set pieces — you can go straight to the cathedral, or to the storeroom where Franz and Willem are flogged, without scrolling through a year of K.’s paperwork, and the last chapter is four taps away in the table of contents.

The guide above is written for readers who want the context as well as the text: the 1914 composition and the 1925 edition, Brod’s ordering, Wyllie’s translation, the parable of the doorkeeper and the three kinds of acquittal. Read the novel first if you can. The cathedral chapter is a different experience once you have spent nine chapters watching K. argue, and the last page lands harder when you have heard him be reasonable for three hundred pages, watched every argument fail, and still expected him to win.

• Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #7849 — the complete Wyllie text, unabridged, with Kafka’s chapter titles as Brod printed them.
• Formats included EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB, DRM-free, each with a linked table of contents.
• Chapter marks ten chapter headings, with Brod’s note that chapter eight was left unfinished.
• The translation David Wyllie’s plain English, with no modernised dialogue and nothing cut.

Part of: Modern classics · Classic fiction