The Trial

Air—and airlessness—is an important symbol throughout the novel. The court and its offices are characterized from early on by stuffiness or a lack of air. The apartment where K.’s initial inquiry is held, for example, is crowded and musty. The attic of the apartment building that houses the court offices is also stuffy and airless, and the poor air quality soon causes K. to collapse and feel “seasick” (78). When K. goes to see the painter Titorelli, he finds once again that “the air [is] oppressive” (140), and is hardly surprised when he finds more court offices behind the painter’s back door. The poor air quality of the spaces connected with the court becomes an evocative symbol: The trial is both literally and figuratively suffocating for K.—until the very end of the novel, when the trial resolves itself in the more permanent airlessness of death.

The body features prominently in the novel. Hands are especially prominent, for instance in the emphasis on the webbed fingers of Leni’s small hands, in Public Prosecutor Hasterer’s “strong, hairy hand” (245) in Fragment 2, in the way Block strokes his lawyer’s hands, or in the hands of the two warders who lead K.