Kafka's opening sentence is, like Flaubert's and Tolstoy's, a kind of quiet engineering. Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K. The German verleumden — to slander, to traduce, to bear false witness — carries the presumption that the prosecution is illegitimate. The narrator is signalling to us, in the first clause, that we are about to meet a man who has not done what they say he has done. The second half of the sentence tells us he will nevertheless be arrested. The whole book is in that comma.

Josef K. — the surname abbreviated, in the manner of Kafka's notebooks, as if the name were a symptom the narrator has preserved for the record — is a senior clerk at a bank. He is thirty today. He has his own rented room in a boarding house. The landlady has cooked him a small birthday breakfast. He is going to eat it. He rings the bell for the cook to bring it in.

The door opens. It is not the cook. It is a stranger — a thin, healthy, foreign-looking man in a tight black suit — who comes in, sits down, and begins to eat K.'s breakfast. K. is astonished. Another stranger, also in a tight black suit, appears behind him. A further stranger, who turns out to be K.'s own colleague from the bank, Rabensteiner, is sitting on the sofa reading the morning paper. K. demands to know what is going on. The men tell him, politely, with no aggression but also with no room for negotiation, that he is under arrest.

K. asks what the charge is. The men do not know. They are not, they explain, the authority that would know. They are only the guards. The inspector, they suggest, may tell him. The inspector is in the next room, which turns out to be the bedroom of another of the boarders, a Miss Bürstner, whose room has been borrowed without her permission to conduct the arrest.

K. is taken in to see the inspector. The inspector tells K. nothing. The inspector tells him, with the same politeness, that K. is under arrest but may, for the time being, continue his normal life. He is free to go to work. He is free to eat his meals. He will be informed, in due course, when the court wishes to see him. The arrest is to be understood, the inspector says, as a state of being, not as a physical confinement. K. is free. K. is also, henceforth, the accused.

K. laughs. He demands to know by what authority. He is refused an answer. He protests. He is told that protest is, at this stage, unnecessary. He watches his guards eat the last of his breakfast. He leaves for the bank at nine o'clock, exactly as he would have done on any other birthday, carrying a small puzzled fury that will, over the next year, fail to go away and fail to focus on anything capable of dispelling it.

This is the first station. Kafka has invented, on the first six pages, a genre. A bureaucratic machinery has come into a room without credentials and without charges and has rearranged a man's life. The man is left neither imprisoned nor free. He is free enough to walk to work. He is imprisoned enough that he will, for the remainder of his life, never have a morning again in which he is not also, somewhere, the accused.

A week after the arrest, K. receives a telephone call. He is to present himself on the following Sunday at a certain address in a working-class suburb, for a preliminary inquiry. No time is specified. The caller hangs up.

K. goes. The address is a tenement block. He wanders the stairwells asking strangers where the inquiry is being held. He has no idea what floor. He tries knocking on doors. A young woman in a kitchen tells him, after some hesitation, that the inquiry is on the fifth floor. He climbs the stairs past women washing laundry, children on landings, the smell of cooking cabbage. He arrives on the fifth floor out of breath.

The courtroom turns out to be a small crowded attic room occupied, unexpectedly, by a public audience of perhaps a hundred and fifty people. They are divided, he notices, into two halves by an aisle down the middle. They are crammed onto benches. They watch him with unreadable expressions. At a small table at the front sits the examining magistrate.

The magistrate consults a ledger. He says to K.: you are a house-painter. K. says no, he is the senior clerk of a bank. The magistrate looks again at his ledger. The magistrate looks up. The magistrate says, with no embarrassment and no correction: it is not necessary to insist on the matter.

And here, on page forty-five of Kafka's novel, the reader receives his formative glimpse of the court. The court, Kafka is showing us with absolute economy, does not know who K. is. It has got him confused with someone else. It has put down, in its ledger, a profession that is not his. It has summoned him on that basis. And when he objects it does not care. It does not go back and correct the ledger. It proceeds, as if K. being the man the ledger says he is were equivalent to K. being the man he actually is.

K., incensed, makes a long defiant speech. He denounces the court. He denounces the magistrate. He points out the absurdity of the proceedings. He is certain, while he speaks, that the audience is on his side. He can feel the room with him. He ends his speech flushed with what he takes to be triumph.

And then, in one of Kafka's most unsettling small turns, the audience does something K. has not anticipated. They do not applaud. They do not murmur in agreement. They laugh. They point. They are, it turns out, not an independent public at all. They are — K. realizes as he looks closer at their lapels and their paperwork — all court officials. Every single person in the room is an employee of the court. K. has been speaking, for twenty-five minutes, to an auditorium of the very apparatus he was denouncing, under the mistaken impression that he was speaking to fellow citizens.

He leaves. He has achieved nothing. He has confirmed, to his own private conviction, that the whole thing is a farce. He has also — though he does not yet notice this — accepted the court's jurisdiction by showing up to argue. He will not, from this morning on, quite get back to any version of his old life.

K.'s uncle Karl — a thin bustling provincial — comes to town and has heard, through the family grapevine, that the nephew is in trouble. He is alarmed. He demands K. accompany him, that same afternoon, to see an old school friend of his who is a lawyer, a man named Dr Huld, who has a specialism in precisely this obscure branch of the law.

They arrive at Huld's apartment. The lawyer is in bed. He is, he explains with feeble politeness, terribly ill. He has been ill for years. He receives clients from the bed. A nurse, a young woman named Leni, lets them in, fetches extra pillows, and watches K. with a startling frankness that is, within minutes, going to become relevant.

Huld, from the bed, begins to sketch the nature of the proceedings. He has been an advocate of the court for decades. He knows the officials. He knows, in a general way, the procedures. There is, he says, no way to influence the trial from outside. Proceedings of this court are not public; the documents are not shown to the defence; the judges meet in secret; the charges are not disclosed; the lawyers for the accused are, in fact, not permitted inside the courtroom during sessions. The entire defence is conducted through informal back-channel acquaintances between advocates and court officials, cultivated over years. Huld, he indicates gently, has such acquaintances. He will deploy them on K.'s behalf.

While Huld is speaking, an important court official arrives — the Chief Clerk of the Court, Huld's closest acquaintance on the judicial side. K. is asked to withdraw, so that the gentlemen may confer. He is shown into the next room by the nurse Leni. Leni, in the kitchen, kisses him. He has been in the house twenty-five minutes.

Kafka is demonstrating, by the end of the chapter, the single lesson of the book's middle: there is no Plan B. Hiring a lawyer does not help. The lawyer, however well connected, operates entirely through back-channels. The accused is not permitted to know what is being said or done on his behalf. He is allowed, as a courtesy, to wait. Months pass. Huld's reports are always promising and always vague. A petition is being prepared. The petition has not been submitted yet. The case is delicate. The case requires patience. K. is required to wait in a hallway of his own life while a sick lawyer he has never seen out of bed conducts, or fails to conduct, a defence he will never be shown.

The chapter ends with K. leaving the apartment with the nurse's kiss on his mouth and the suspicion, which will grow over the next several chapters, that the lawyer is in no meaningful sense his lawyer at all. The lawyer serves the court. The nurse serves the accused. The accused is caught between them, paying the lawyer and sleeping with the nurse, getting neither justice nor escape.

K., growing desperate with Huld, is told by a client at the bank about a painter named Titorelli who paints the portraits of the judges of the court and who, by virtue of his studio being a backdoor onto the court's lower world, can sometimes intercede.

K. climbs to Titorelli's attic. It is July. The studio is stifling. The attic room is full of children — small girls, who have been hanging around outside the door and follow K. in — and full of canvases, most of them portraits of judges in sombre robes. Titorelli sells K. one of the paintings. He takes K.'s money. And then, seated on the unmade bed that takes up most of the room, he gives K. the single lecture of the novel on how an acquittal actually works.

There are, Titorelli says, three kinds of possible outcome for a man in K.'s position.

The first is actual acquittal — the court declares the accused not guilty. This outcome, Titorelli says without apology, has never, in his lifetime or his master's, actually happened. Legends persist of ancient acquittals in historical cases. No one can name a living example.

The second is apparent acquittal. The painter intervenes with the lower judges. The judges sign a certificate saying, in effect, we believe this man is innocent. The certificate is passed around, stamped by several officials, and released. The accused is declared, temporarily, free. However — Titorelli emphasises — the higher court never sees this certificate. The higher court's dossier on the case remains open. The certificate can be overruled at any time, often years later, often without notice. A rearrest can happen tomorrow, or next year, or on the accused's deathbed. Apparent acquittal is not a termination of the case. It is a pause.

The third is indefinite postponement. The painter persuades the court to delay all proceedings. The case simply stops moving. This requires the accused to regularly visit the painter to renew the intervention, indefinitely, for the rest of his life. He is, technically, never tried. He is also, technically, still the accused. He will be the accused at the moment of his death.

These, Titorelli tells K., are the three outcomes. Of them, only the first is really acquittal; it does not exist. The other two are the real possibilities, and they are indistinguishable from being accused forever.

K. listens. He takes the painting. He pays Titorelli for a second painting he does not want. He leaves by the rear door of the studio, which opens, to his astonishment, directly onto a different corridor of the court. The studio, he now realizes, is an organ of the court. The painter is in the court's pay. The acquittals the painter offers are offered by the very mechanism the accused is trying to escape.

The chapter is the book's clearest ethical architecture. There is no way out through the front door. There is a way out through the back door, to stand in the corridor of the court indefinitely, quietly, without being tried. The front and the back exits are of the same building.

K. has been sent by the bank to give a tour of the city's cathedral to an Italian business associate. The associate does not show. K. wanders into the nearly empty cathedral by himself in the grey December afternoon. The lamps are mostly unlit. A single candle flickers in a side chapel. A priest climbs into a small pulpit. The cathedral is empty except for K. and the priest.

And the priest begins to preach — not a sermon in any ordinary sense, but a parable. The parable is framed as a legal story. It is, the priest says, a parable from the introduction to the law. The priest recites it with the calm of a man who has told it many times.

Before the law, he begins, stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country, who begs for admittance to the law. The doorkeeper says he cannot admit him at this moment. The man asks if he may enter later. The doorkeeper says perhaps, but not now. The man sits down beside the door. He waits. He waits years. He bribes the doorkeeper with everything he has; the doorkeeper takes the bribes but does not admit him. The man grows old. His eyesight fails. His hearing fails. He is reduced, at the end of his life, to being permitted only to peer through the open door from his seat on the ground. A radiant light begins to stream out through the doorway. The man, sensing his death, has one last question. He asks the doorkeeper: how is it, in all these years, no one else has ever come to this door and asked to enter. The doorkeeper has to stoop down to hear the question; the man is shrivelled; the doorkeeper leans close. He says, loudly, because the man is nearly deaf: no one else could ever have been admitted here. This entrance was meant only for you. I am now going to close it.

And the parable ends.

K., in the cathedral, stands below the pulpit. He is not a trained reader of parables. He tries to decide what it means. He proposes interpretations: the doorkeeper deceived the man. The priest says: the doorkeeper did not deceive the man, he gave him information freely. K. proposes: then the man was deceived by his own hopes. The priest says: possibly; some have read it so. K. proposes: then the doorkeeper is the more deceived, because he knew less about the interior than he thought. The priest says: this too has been argued. K. asks: then which interpretation is correct? The priest says: many are possible; all are inadequate. The scripture, he says, is unalterable; the comments are often only expressions of our despair at it.

K. leaves the cathedral. He does not fully understand. He understands enough. The parable is the whole novel compressed into a page. The man from the country is K. The door is the law. The doorkeeper is the court. The door has been standing open the whole time. The law has been waiting, not for a universal decision, but for this one man's decision, and this one man has spent his life seated in front of it, bribing the doorkeeper, without walking through.

Whether K. understands that he is supposed to walk through, and whether it is already too late, is left — in the characteristic Kafkan way — for the reader to decide. K. does not walk through. He goes back to the bank.

The scene is the book's briefest and its most physically disturbing. K. has been working late at the bank. He has been noticing, for a day or two, an odd sound from an unused storeroom at the end of a corridor on his floor. He has meant to investigate. He opens the door.

The storeroom is small. It contains, in addition to filing cabinets, three men. Two of them — stripped to the waist — are bent over. K. recognizes them. They are the two guards who came to his boarding-house to arrest him two months earlier, Franz and Willem, the ones who ate his breakfast and whom he subsequently complained of, in passing, to the examining magistrate, because they had demanded his silk underwear as a tip. The third man in the storeroom is an executioner of the court — a whipper, stripped also to the waist, wearing a kind of leather apparatus, carrying a bundle of birch rods.

K. is horrified. He asks what is happening. The whipper answers, with the same bureaucratic calm everyone in this court possesses, that the two guards are being punished because K. had filed a complaint about them. The complaint has been processed. The court has found the guards at fault. The whipper has been dispatched to administer the punishment. It is to be forty strokes each.

K. stammers. He had not meant the complaint that seriously. He had not, in any case, asked for anything so physical. He says so. The whipper shrugs: the complaint was filed; the court acted; this is the action. The guards, in a panic, cry out that they have families, that they will lose everything, that K. should bribe the whipper to stop. K. reaches in his pocket. He offers the whipper a bank note. The whipper refuses: he cannot be bribed at this stage; the bank note would only look like new evidence against the guards; K. would make things worse. The whipper begins the flogging.

K., in a state of dismay, closes the door and walks away down the corridor. He cannot bring himself to watch. He hears the cries. He goes home. The next evening, at the bank, he is drawn back to the storeroom. He opens the door again. The scene has not changed. The two guards are still stripped to the waist. The whipper is still standing with his rods. They are still in the identical positions. It is as if a day has not passed. K. closes the door and has two clerks come with shovels to remove all of it. He goes back to his desk.

Kafka has here, in three pages, given his clearest single image of what the court does. The court does not only punish. The court does not only accuse. The court punishes the people inside its own machine for infractions an accused has named, using the accused's own casual complaints as the trigger. The whole apparatus works by making every participant — guard, lawyer, accused, whipper — complicit in the punishment of every other participant. K. has, by filing the complaint, become an accessory to a flogging he did not request. The story is the whole novel in one cupboard.

One year has passed. It is K.'s thirty-first birthday. He is at home in his room in the boarding house. He is expecting no one. There is a knock at the door.

Two men come in. They are wearing black frock-coats and top hats. They have been sent to conduct him, they say, to the execution of the verdict. They do not say what verdict. K. does not ask. He has spent the year slipping, by degrees, into an awareness that the trial has been going on without him — that Huld's petitions have been put off, that Titorelli's strategies have been deferred, that the cathedral priest's parable had a door he did not walk through — and that the verdict, whatever it is, is now coming not as a surprise but as a completion.

He puts on his coat. He walks with them out of the house. They walk through the city. It is a warm night in late spring. The streets are empty. The three of them walk three abreast, with K. in the middle, his arms linked tightly with the two guards. They do not speak. They cross the river. They enter a workers' suburb. They walk until they come to a small deserted stone quarry on the edge of the city. The moon is full.

In the quarry, among the white stones, they stop. They take off K.'s coat. They take off his jacket. They arrange him carefully against a block. One of them produces a long butcher's knife. The two men look at each other. It is clear, from a small ritual they perform with the knife, that one of them is supposed to stab K. and the other is supposed to hold him, and that neither of them wishes to do the stabbing.

K., in his last moment, understands what is expected. He is expected to take the knife from them and do it himself. He almost does. His hand moves toward the knife. And then — and Kafka gives this moment an extraordinary small piece of breath — he cannot. He looks up. He sees a window high above the quarry. A light is on. A figure — a single figure, sexless, impossible to identify — is leaning out of the window. The figure lifts a hand. K. cannot tell whether the gesture is a wave, a summons, a plea, a benediction. The figure is very far away. The window is lit.

And in that last instant K. does not take the knife from the guards. The two men go through with it themselves. One of them holds his throat. The other twists the knife in his heart. They leave him in the quarry.

K.'s last sentence — delivered, Kafka writes, as if in some way his own — is the one in the epigraph. Like a dog, he says. It was as if the shame of it should outlive him.

The novel ends on that sentence. There is no funeral. There is no recrimination. There is no investigation. Kafka leaves us in the moonlight in the quarry with a man dead against a stone and his own small final judgment about the manner of his dying. The court is not present at the execution. The court has sent two ordinary men with a knife. The accused, given the opportunity to take his own life, has not taken it, and has therefore died in a way he himself, in his last conscious thought, has named as shameful. It is one of the most exact endings in the twentieth-century novel.