The Role of the Omnipresent Door in The Trial, a Novel by Franz Kafka

In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, K. goes through an omnipresent door which shows K’s situation where one side of the door is blurry from the other. Making his way through a convoluted and anarchic city, he is repeatedly going in and out of doors, passageways, and halls. K. says he goes: “through an opening which had no door,” (65) and surely realizes that he is lost. David Foster Wallace said the joke in Kafka’s work is “that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle—that our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

” Our world is now seen as a mirror world, where social media affects how we view ourselves.

Throughout the novel, Kafka creates a space within the ubiquitous door, which supports Wallace’s statement that man is always searching for what he already has. K cannot decide to go through the door, these feelings stem from having very little self-esteem.

An anonymous voice says: “First he wants to go, then you tell him a hundred times that the door is in front of him and he makes no move to go” (72). K. finally gets through the door, after being trapped without help. The door is not a periphery, despite its subsistence. This goes hand in hand with David Foster Wallace’s quote – we should imagine Kafka’s art a door. “…pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking.

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That, finally, the door opens… and it opens outward – we’ve been inside what we wanted all along” (Wallace). One can determine what Wallace was referring to. Our lives and how we view ourselves are determined by the actions we took to develop them.

The Hunger Artist relates to K because they both experience frustration, displeasure, and yearning for something more. The Hunger Artist struggles with his self image, confused about why his spectators question his work: “…because the sight of him was too much for them, perhaps it was the dissatisfaction with himself that had worn him down.” The Hunger Artist wonders if it is the way that he views himself that influences the spectators’ opinions towards him. In “The Penal Colony” the apparatus shows the accused that actions certainly speak louder than words: “He doesn’t know the sentence that has been passed on him?” “No,” said the officer again, pausing a moment as if to let the explorer elaborate his question, and then said: “there would be no point in telling him. He’ll learn it on his body” (12). The quote might stress that words are useless, that rather actions can help a person realize their faults. This relates to the previous stories because while The Hunger Artist fasts, K seals his fate by fumbling between multiple doors and hallways—possibly describing the battle we have with our own self-image. We constantly work, and struggle to get what we want or reach where we want to be. It could involve a person to struggle with an array of feelings like self-doubt and self-pity. A clear example of battling with one’s self is when K in The Trial has a moment in which he seems hopeless, trying to find his way through the door: “I’ll never find the way” (66). During the journey of self-discovery, questions are brought up, feelings are felt which could discourage the person from reaching their ultimate goal. Perhaps he might never find his way because he is already where he needs to be.

Even though these doorways are not seen as ordinary, their presence is instantaneous and persistent. At first, K wonders if he can enter the door, in which he gets this response from the doorkeeper: “It is possible … but not at this moment” (213). This might hint that Kafka will soon be able to get through the door. Kafka generates a space within the door, which lends its importance to the theme of time and spaces in the novel. The inspector in the next scene tells the main character K that he has gained access to go through the door: “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut it” (215). Possibly the door symbolizes our battle: how we view ourselves, our inner most thoughts and feelings. While we believe we are struggling, struggling to achieve something more, we must realize that we are in charge of how others perceive us. When we discover what was proposed for us, we can be more at peace. A person is their worst enemy, the way others recognize us is irrelevant. Though K has been told he can lead a regularly normal life; his freedom is hopeless, because as the novel goes on he is kept within the space, and will not escape it.

Kafka’s works were highly influential for their time because they examined issues that were way ahead of their time, which are still around today. The Door in The Trial offers major insight into our self-image because it shows the struggle one has with themselves. And when they realize things about themselves that are novel and extraneous they will find solace. With everything aside, truth and justice cease to exist in a conformist sense. K realizes this to be true when he says: “You don’t need to accept everything as true, you only need to accept it as necessary” (240).