I think when people describe something as “kafkaesque”, they really are refering to this book. I remember reading The Metamorphosis in high school and not quite seeing the fit between the use of the adjective and the story: Gregor Samsa’s transformation isn’t really about some kind of external force (the Court’s bureaucracy) that impinges on him but rather the internal anguish that he feels. The externality of the Court is I think the most important difference between The Metamorphosis and The Trial, and it is what distinguishes the latter as being the best representative of what is “kafkaesque”: only that which is outside of you can be simultaneously all-powerful and mysterious.
What makes this novel stand out to me is its unrelenting ambiguity. I don’t think I have read something whose story is just so peripheral: Josef K. never develops to learn more about what crime he is accused of; he does not develop or change as a character; at the end he just dies unceremoniously. If you can draw the arc of the plot, it would be a straight line, with Josef K. stumbling from one surreal encounter after another, his life being circumscribed more and more tightly by the Court but, as the man from the country in the priest’s parable, never getting past the first door of the Law. The lack of resolution is jarring and frustrating but also simultaneously exhiliarating, as if it is the discovery of a new language for telling stories, stories that don’t have arcs or resolutions but precisely for that lack conveys a blinding truth.
It would be easy to find interpretations of this novel that purport to draw its intended meaning. I would be most partial I think to some kind of Freudian interpretation, but interpretation is exactly what destroys the ambiguity that I enjoy about The Trial so much. I find Kafka’s work fascinating because he takes the world as it is and transmutes it just so, just makes it fantastical enough to convey a feeling so vividly — and more than anything, more than any kind of political or psychological point you can extract from this book, this sense of dread and anxiety and unknowing is what sticks to the mind. (And like most good art, its main contribution is sensory, not propositional.) It isn’t hard to see why Garcia-Marquez finds inspiration in him, and why you can take him to be a precursor to the magical realists.