Una sentencia justa para Josef K.: sobre El proceso de Kafka

Abstract

At the beginning of The Process the narrator says that Josef K. was arrested one morning «having done nothing serious». Nevertheless there are very few critics that have taken this sentence to the letter. As Josef K. is executed at last, it must be supposed that the character should have commited some sort of crime. Though it has been speculated a lot about which this crime could be, it has been impossible to reach a firm decision. What this way of reading the story shows is that is tremendously difficult to conceive the idea of a world in which it would be possible to arrest and execute innocent people with no justification at all. But this is precisely the basis of the fiction world imagined by Kafka, who through The Process prefigured the terror lived all over Europe dominated by totalitarism.