Existentialism In Franz Kafka's The Trial

Franz Kafka’s the trial is cryptically symbolic piece of existentialist writing. More so than that, the one constant overarching theme that keeps coming up in every review I’ve read is the word parable used over and over again. Despite the general themes of The Trial there are a series of key microcosm issues that come up in almost every chapter. These issue depending on the interpretation of these smaller issues could change the general analysis of the entire book. In my opinion. Nevertheless, the primary focus here will be to try to relate Kafka’s more generalized concreate themes (if any really exist), to the current social and cultural environment of 1920’s Eastern Europe. Before going any further, it should be qualified that the 1920’s was pick based on when Kafka’s The Trial was published. Based on the unique nature of how the book came to be published it is entirely possible that Kafka could have written it ten years before it was published. It is recognized that this piece could reflect a different period of time than when it was published, but nevertheless I will carry on as if it had been written the year it was published. Europe in the 1920’s was a place of disorder. Peter Tillich …show more content…
The themes of futility and anxiety are societal woes as old as enlighten thinking itself. Both Kafka and the rest of Europe was just the unfortunate victims of a time that provoked such nihilistic and necessary thinking. In The Trial and in the modernist movement, they were just working with the only thing they had. Their own lives. The fact that they were beings in a time despair and death allowed them to get a glimpse of something simple. Something so simple its unspeakable. A truth that allowed them to confront the human condition more so than those that haven’t experienced that level of misery. Maybe it wasn’t a truth, maybe it wasn’t anything more than a glimpse at