A 4th possible reading of Kafka's The Trial

I’ll briefly add a 4^th way in which to read Franz Kafka’s The Trial (posthumously published in 1925): the Personal. I haven’t delved into Kafka’s notebooks, journals, and letters, but without even doing so it’s evident from this and other works of his that he was a man of great suffering, besieged by guilt and shame. Why this may have been, I can’t even speculate – but the suffering that Joseph K experiences throughout this book of torment suggests a need for expiation and a crushing sense of dread that permeates Joseph K’s life and discolors and and all of his worldly success. In this novel, Joseph K (the abbreviated patronym left as a clear marker pointing toward the author) wakes one morning to be accused by some nebulous legal authority of some undisclosed and unknown crime; in some ways this is a motif for many of Kafka’s works – in particular, the most famous of his stories, in with Gregor Samsa wakes up to find that he’s been “metamorphosed” into a cockroach. Though K’s situation is less revolting, it’s in some ways more frightening to the reader, as it’s within our scope of possibility: You really could be wakened by a police force knocking on your door for some unknown (and unjustified) reason. I haven’t finished (re)reading The Trial, but I suspect we will never know the reason behind the accusation; but on a personal level we see that this book summarizes Kafka’s struggle with demons of persecution, without being able to offer or articulate the reason for his guilt and shame.