Maya's Chapter 8 Reaction

          In the eighth chapter of The Trial, the reader is introduced to Block. Block, much like K., was a respectable man with a good job who got sucked into the vortex that is their country’s legal system. Block is presented a certain light which shows him at his wit’s end, clawing weakly at the chance of innocence. I hope that this can be a warning to K. Personally, if I were him, I wouldn’t devote my entire life to the trial. However, it does not seem like there is another way around it. This, to me, is particularly frightening. I could not imagine having to spend all that time running in circles, making one futile attempt after another, trying to find resolution to something like that. Personally, I’m impressed K. has made it this long. I would have gone insane at this point. 

         Now having read well into the book, it seems as though all the weirdness that Kafka has chosen to incorporate into the novel is more of a literary device to get his point across than just plain insanity. I believe that all of the ambiguity that Kafka portrays the government with in his novel is reflective of his own personal beliefs regarding government. I would not say that the message he is trying to get across is as radical as Ayn Rand’s, but I think on some very basic level they would agree with the same principles. It all kind of goes back to what we were discussing in class with Dostoyevsky; being “rendered inactive”. Dostoyevsky’s character is trapped in this state because of how he is conscious about every little aspect, K. has been rendered inactive by his own government much like Rand’s characters Dagny Taggart and John Galt were in Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s characters found a solution to their problem, they left their society all together. I am still unsure as to whether K. will end up like Block or more like Dagny and Galt (even more so because the book was never finished so the editors had to kind of work with what they had and assume how Kafka would have ended it). 

           I think that if Kafka were alive today, he would agree that government can and sometimes does give the illusion that you are “free”. I’m not saying he was a supporter of anarchy or anything like that, but to a certain degree, you can tell from The Trial that he obviously sees a problem with too much of it. It also seems as though Kafka has very little faith on the efficiency of government. When K. tries to take matters into his own hands, there either is either no solution for him or the solution is so convoluted and confusing that it is completely useless to him. Whenever K. has a plan of action, there is a minimal amount of progress and occasionally, his plan is interrupted by strangely thick, unbreathable air.