The Absurd in Franz Kafka's *The Trial*

In the second half of 1914, whilst Europe was engulfed in the flames of the first total war in its history, Franz Kafka wrote his second novel, *The Trial*, in Prague: a work he abandoned in a moment of deep despondency in early 1915. Yet once it was published in Berlin in 1925, a year after his death, it began to establish him as one of the best-known and most influential writers of the 20th century. As we know, however, Kafka did not want his work to survive him, apart from a few texts published during his lifetime: short stories, narratives, or even chapters and brief excerpts from his novels. These, including *The Trial*, were to be burnt, he wrote to his friend Max Brod whilst on his deathbed. Had this wish been carried out, therefore, we would have had only two pages of *The Trial* - namely, those concerning the legend that the chaplain recounts to Josef K. in the penultimate chapter. He did, in fact, extract them from his manuscript to publish them separately, first in Prague and then in Leipzig in 1915.