Kafka's Ambiguity

This need to submit to Kafka’s ambiguity can best be seen in a scene in the same introductory chapter of the initial court session. After K. is informed by phone of his first hearing, Kafka explains, “Of course he was required to appear; they presumed it was not really necessary to point that out. He was given the number of the building in which he was to appear: it was a building on a street in a distant district K. had never been to before (Kafka, 36). Just as the phone call had introduced an ambiguous “they” and an unclear time frame, this excerpt shows the absurd and ambiguous instructions that K. is given. He is not given an exact time of the trial, he has never been to the place that he has been told to go, and the number of the building
The story develops anxiously, yet the climactic end to the piece is not wrapped in the expected grand reveal of some sort of political, social or sexual discovery for the reader to revel in. Instead, K. is slaughtered by “they”, and he is killed without ever reaching a conclusion about himself or his trial. “Like a dog… (Kafka, 231), K exists in a reality and a consciousness marked by uncertainty of fate, lack of knowledge about the reality of his situation, which ends with a senseless death in which there is little to no self-reflection. Kafka creates a story that is constructed by a mountain of countless dead ends that we must attempt to break through. After the thirsting reader trudges on through the uncertainty, K. dies in a way that leaves the reader craving answers, as we are met with a final dead end. A similar polarity exists between the viewer and the main character in After Hours, the 1985 The Trial inspired film. After a brief encounter with a woman in a coffee shop, followed by a strange phone call between the woman in which she invites him over to a SoHo art studio, Paul Hackett begins a night of endless troubles as he continues to run into problems of ambiguous nature and meaningless coincidences. Paul encounters a number of woman, all who give him some sort of life story that seems to go nowhere and mean nothing. Right before what Paul thought was about to be a casual-hookup, the first woman that he meets, Marcy, tells him about her ex-boyfriend and her Husband, and their abusive sexual behaviors. Later on in the movie, Paul encounters this ex-boyfriend when he realizes that Marcy has killed herself. Despite the innumerable connections that start to emerge between characters, the uncertain structure of this world, the utter