I just finished Kafka's "The Trial". I know that

>and I can only chock up to being intentionally ludicrous for the sake of it
Well, yeah. The Trial is just one absurd, bureaucratic nightmare. The discomfort you feel when presented with the whole process is intentional. It's not supposed to be fair or right or logical.

When he is first summoned to the courts and finds himself in the tenement house, I remember thinking that he was having some kind of delusion. As the scene went on, I decided that it must be some kind of reference to hell, because of the vague nature of the court, the fact that it was overbearingly humid, the gross acts of sexual indecency that are committed, and the mention that the officials of the court are living there. I abandoned this idea after he was visited by his uncle, because I realized that at least people that he had known separately from the law acknowledged the existence of the institution, but I still found numerous details ridiculous. For example the men who had arrested him being flogged in the store room at the bank, and the way that other characters seem to have omnipotent knowledge of K.

>>9160815

So what's the moral?

>>9160837
>For example the men who had arrested him being flogged in the store room at the bank
Could stuff like this (is it written in 1st person?) be part hallucination/imagination, like he was wishing the person who arrested him was being flogged? Showing how we project our desires onto the external world?

>>9160837
It's not a fable, you simplistic jag.
Even if literary criticism and deeper meaning escape you when it comes a particular novel, the internet is a wonderful resource for professional, academic, and amateur interpretations of a work's themes and messages.
Try doing research somewhere other than 4chan. Read a few different theories and see if you can't build on/off of them yourself to develop a more complete and personal understanding of the text.

>>9160907

Perhaps, but I don't see anything consistent in the book that would make that a likely explanation. It's written i the 3rd person, but the narrator is limited. I always thought that such an explanation was weak, and applied in very few situations.

>>9160959

Weird, this Cornell paper seems to think that it's a parable.

https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/hd11/BeforeTheLaw.html

>>9160970

Sorry, allegory.

honestly I think only The Metamorphosis makes a lot of sense

>>9160970
That's just an another interpretation. The Trial is a bit of a mirror for the reader when it comes to its meaning. Recently I read an analysis that (surprisingly convincingly) sees the book as a religious allegory. My lit prof, who grew up in a communist regime, sees it as an illustration of totalitarianism. I today see it as an illustration of dehumanized modern society (though when I was a kid obsessed with fantasy, I thought it was just a really weird story and enjoyed exploring the structure of this bizarre court).

>>9161214

I know that it's not a concrete interpretation, I was just pointing out what an ass that guy was.

>>9160794
This might be an overly simplistic interpretation but I thought it was a story of how cruel and unjust original sin is. What tipped me off about this is that he's arrested on his birthday, and then he's always haunted by a seemingly all-powerful, completely incomprehensible judicial system. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's hard to be right about something like this tbqh familia

>>9161600

That's an interesting analysis, seeing as, how you pointed out, both the first and last scene happen on or near his birthday (he was executed about 4 hours before he turned 31). I never even considered that.