And children both fail to understand the need for tortuous administrative and legal process (where necessary) and immediately see through such processes when they are clearly unneeded, or even actively harmful. One critic, Mark Spilka, produced a study in the 1960s, Dickens and Kafka: A mutal interpretation, which argued that Kafka, like Dickens, was essentially childlike in his understanding of the world. So The Trial, the novel in which ‘Before the Law’ appears, is not about one man’s specific trial for some specific crime, but is instead about the ‘trials’ of living, the ‘process’ (to use the original German word for the novel’s title) of dealing with a nagging sense of guilt for some vague and unspecified sin or wrongdoing, just as it is about the ‘process’ or ‘trial’ of negotiating innumerable bureaucratic obstacles that dominate our adult life.
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