Kafka The Trial Analysis

This thesis specially deals with the question “how does deconstruction make a space to let “absurdism” come into the prison-house of text ? In Franz Kafka The Trial (1925). Kafka’s language and techniques has reformulated the relationship between deconstruction and absurdism and changed the manner in which they are related through his novel The Trial . According to Derrida, literature stands on the edge of everything, almost beyond everything, including itself. (Derrida’s, Act of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), p.47. For deconstructive thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Emmanuel Levinas, deconstruction can be seen as the act of questioning and looking at limits and borders, but according

Franz Kafka is one of the iconic, most prominent and influential novelists and short story writers of the early 20th century as he seems to be accessible to any critical and philosophical methodology one might care to apply. In fact, Kafka appears to be the ideal model for literary criticism. The debate on the possibility and validity of any interpretation of his novel The Trial is endless. This is why critics have interpreted kafka’s The Trial in the context of literary schools such as modernism, postmodernism and literary philosophy. Critics of Franz Kafka, the German author, have lamented that exhibiting an open-ended text in The Trial doesn’t provide them with a final meaning, also the notion of “creation” in Borges shows that Kafka’s works reveal that a text is not closed upon itself but it is open and in “communication” with other texts in the past and the

This can be understood in the context of Jacques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction and the idea of “difference” in addition to the principles of absurdism which include double negation, lack of reason, incongruity and lack of order. It is due to these concepts especially “deconstruction”, which means to “disassemble the parts of the whole” or to lose its construction” that helped in better understanding to Kafka’s The Trial where the undecidability of the text looms predominantly. In this sense, Derrida’s own words, the undecidability “is not only an oscillation between contradictory rules which are very well determined and both equally peremptory”. This study will discuss how the language of deconstruction opens the space for absurdism in kafka’s The Trial. In the opening chapter Joseph K. is arrested and this arrest process took place not at physical standard but at mental standard. Mr. K. feels confined and eventually this process of the trial proves to be the major theme which provides meaning to his movements and also making nonsense of his life because the more we go forward to reach the meaning beyond the trial, the more we dissociate ourselves from it. This trial unfolds a paradox which appears in Kafka’s search for the origin of the law in the