"The Trial" is a novel by Franz Kafka about a character named Josef K., who awakens one morning and, for reasons never revealed, is arrested and prosecuted for an unspecified crime.
The novel was originally published posthumously in 1925 as Der Prozess. The chapters were organized and the book published by Kafka's friend and literary executor, Max Brod, despite Kafka's request that Brod destroy the manuscript. One of Kafka's major works, and perhaps his most pessimistic, this surreal story of a young man who finds himself caught up in the mindless bureaucracy of the law has become synonymous with modern anxieties and a sense of alienation and with every mans' struggle against an unreasoning and unreasonable authority. It is often considered to be an imaginative anticipation of totalitarianism.
