FRANZ KAFKA
413
takes an advocate who tells him at once that the only sensible thing
to do is to adapt oneself to existing conditions and not to criticize
them. He turns to the prison chaplain for advice and the chaplain
preaches the hidden greatness of the system and orders him not to
ask for the truth, "for it is not necessary to accept everything as true,
one must accept it as necessary." "A melancholy conclusion," said
K., "it turns lying into a universal principle."
The force of the machinery in which the
K.
of
The Trial
is
caught lies precisely in this appearance of necessity on the one hand,
and in the admiration of the people for necessity on the other. Lying
for the sake of necessity appears as something sublime; and a man
who does not submit to the machinery, though submission may mean
his death, is regarded as a sinner against some kind of divine order.
In the case of K., submission is obtained not by force, but simply
through the increasing feeling of guilt which the unbased accusation
has originated in the accused man. This feeling, of course, is based
in the last instance on the fact that no man is free from guilt. And
since K., a busy bank employee, has never had time to ponder such
generalities, he is induced into exploring certain unfamiliar regions
of his ego. This, in turn, leads him into confusion, into mistaking the
organized and wicked evil of the world surrounding him for some
necessary expression of that general guiltiness which is harmless and
almost innocent if compared with the bad will that turns "lying into
a universal principle" and uses and abuses even man's justified
humbleness.
The feeling of guilt, therefore, which gets hold of K. and starts
an interior development of its own, changes and models
i~
victim
until he fits into the situation of standing a trial. It is this feeling
which makes him capable of entering the world of necessity and in–
justice and lying, of playing a role according to the rules, of adapting
himself to existing conditions. This interior development of the hero
-his
6ducation sentimentale--constitutes
a second level of the story
which accompanies the functioning of the bureaucratic machine. The
events of the exterior world and the interior development coincide
finally in the last scene of the execution, an execution to which, al–
though it
is
without reason,
K.
submits without a struggle.
It has been characteristic of our history conscious century that
its worst crimes have been committed
in'
the name of some kind of
necessity or in the name-and this amounts to the same thing--of
the "wave of the future." For people who submit to
this,
who re–
nounce their freedom and their right of action, even though they may
pay the price of death for their delusion, anything more charitable
