McIntosh-Byrd is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. In the following essay she examines the extent to which Kafka's The Trial can be read as a parable about the history of European Christianity.

The body of critical commentary on the works of Franz Kafka is huge enough to have warranted the description, "fortress Kafka," and the extant criticism on The Trial is no exception. Readings of the novel have spanned the range from Calvinist to postmodernist, by way of Marxism, feminism and post-structuralism. In many ways, the seemingly endless series of commentaries and perspectives is highly appropriate to the subject matter of The Trial. Both within the novel and by nature of the body of critique which surrounds it, The Trial raises insistent questions about the nature of meaning, interpretation and reality which ultimately remain unanswered and unanswerable. Joseph K.'s inability to find or...