The Trial Essay Research Paper THE TRIALby — страница 2

audience of important looking men. He gets berated for being late and is asked if he’s a house painter. K. takes this opportunity to address the audience (which answers with applause) about how much this court sucks, it can’t get its facts straight, this whole thing is a farce, a conspiracy? He is cut off by a man pressing the woman he saw outside the courtroom to him and shrieking. K. makes his way through the crowd and leaves. Chapter 3: In the Empty Courtroom / The Student / The Offices The next Sunday K. feels he should go back to the court, only to get there and finding nobody there but the woman he saw before. She apologizes for the disturbance, and blames it on Bertold, a law student who has been chasing her around, although she is the wife of the usher. K. examines

the books left on the table, only to find that apparently the Examining Magistrate has a taste for erotica. He is interrupted by the woman, who starts to tell him about the Examining Magistrate and how he was writing a brief on K.’s case last week before coming in to look at her sleeping. He even gave her some stockings, look! And she shows them to him. Bertold has entered the room at some point and is hulking towards them. Nevertheless the woman insinuates that K. can have her, only to be interrupted by Bertold, who carries her off. K. chases them into the court offices but loses them. The usher comes in and complains about Bertold chasing his wife (even though she throws herself at him) and how he would love to see him flattened. He tries to interest Joseph in this matter and

they start walking through the labyrinthine, dark, stifling offices. Along the way they get to a hallway filled with men waiting for word on their cases. K. gets spooked and wants to leave, but he’s lost. He begins to feel faint and has to sit down, helped by a young woman and a man. He finally makes his way out, carried along by the man and young woman, badly shaken and not wanting to come back. Chapter 4: Fr?ulein B?rstner’s Friend (Editors’s note: In the new edition, this chapter is consigned to the Fragments section, so it goes straight from the empty courtroom to the whipper.) Joseph wants to talk to Fr?ulein B?rstner again, but she hasn’t been around. One day he notices an awful racket coming from her room and finds out that her friend, Fr?ulein Montag, a sickly

French teacher, is moving in with her. He talks to Frau Grubach about it, who says she’ll stop the noise if he wants but that yes, Fr?ulein B?rstner is indeed having Fr?ulein Montag move in with her. Joseph is upset over this turn of events, apparently started by his own behavior, and goes to see the room for himself, where he meets Fr?ulein Montag. She won’t tell him exactly why she’s moving in, and says that Fr?ulein B?rstner doesn’t want to talk to him. He goes back to his room, thinking about what all this might mean. Chapter 5: The Whipper K. is walking to his office in the Bank when he hears a horrible scream. He investigates and finds that Franz and Willem, the warders, are being whipped in a dark little storeroom. They plead with him to let them off, they have

their own troubles, but the whipper is adamant about doing his duty. K. tries to buy him off, but no, that won’t do. Finally he tries to pull them out of the room but is foiled. For the next week he can’t get it out of his mind and goes back to look at the room, only to find everything as it was last week, with the whipper and the two warders there again. K. slams the door and yells for someone to clean out the closet. Chapter 6: K.’s Uncle / Leni K.’s uncle Karl (or Albert) visits him in his office. He has come in from the country, upset over his nephew’s case and wanting to help him. They go to see one of his uncle’s school friends, Dr. Huld, who is very sick but knows all about Joseph’s case. He has just been talking to the Chief Clerk, and the three of them

begin talking. Meanwhile Joseph’s mind is on the nurse, a young woman called Leni. In the middle of the conversation he hears a crash, and goes to check it out, finding out that Leni just wanted to get him alone with her. She wants him to like her, she insists, but Joseph is more interested in his case. This painting of an important-looking judge, for instance. Will he be his judge? Oh, no, no, he’s just an examining magistrate, done up as if he were important. In fact, he’s just a midget. Leni advises him to confess and not be so unyielding. She wants to know all about his girlfriend Elsa, a waitress in a club, and he shows her a photograph. She is less than impressed, saying that she looks hard and wouldn’t he like to trade her for a better one? Does she have a defect,