The Grief Cycle in The Trial by Franz Kafka - Essay Example

number The Grief Cycle: Kafka’s The Trial People are going through the different stages of life as one is born until his death. Living in this world defines how life changes and how the environment affects the development. But apparently, the end could never be stopped. In one’s life, death is certain, failure always comes and the inevitable things are unavoidable. For a dying person, it is difficult to accept that the most precious time in this world of living is counted. Same thing happens when one person loses his job, his career and loses the trust of the people around him. It feels like the word is acceptance is the hardest word to learn and realize its true meaning. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (1969), the author of ‘On Death and Dying’, describes the emotional cycle through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. On the other hand, these ideas are tested in order to understand fully the way a man lived the last year of his life in a story called, ‘The Trial’. The stages Kübler-Ross discussed are said to be a way to interpret the life of K. most especially during the time he was in the difficult stage of his life. As a Doctor, Kübler-Ross makes a significant move on writing the book because it helps the patients and also her colleagues to comprehend with the cycle of emotional states of a person. Sometimes even Doctors are having difficulties admitting to themselves that a patient is dying and they just could not do something about it. But how effective these ideas can be to lighten up someone who is in the stage of depression? The cycle does not only pertain to a dying person, but also to a person who is in a bad situation such as hearing that a relative died, losing a career and other. Accordingly, it is fundamental to analyze Kübler-Ross’ ideas and specifically apply to the story of ‘The Trial’. The Trial The novel is all about Josef K., a man who works in a bank as a senior clerk that was taken into custody by two agents. It was an unexpected arrest and the two agents did not discuss why K. was caught. He was then asked to wait for further instructions by the Committee of Affairs. Consequently, he was able to meet various people significant in his life and the case gets aggravated. It then changed his personality of being a confident man to an uneasy man just like the people he has met before (Kafka, 1984). Thus, the story depicts the life of K. and how he tried to cope up with a series of events that significantly defined his life before his death. The life of K. became vague in the story and reflects the interesting life of the author Franz Kafka. The author was born in Prague and belongs to a Jewish family. He worked as salesmen and treated writing as a curse; he did not even wanted to publish his works but a friend did after he died. He foresees his life as a mere failure because he cannot make his father proud, he has achieved a lot though. Same with the character of K. in the story, Franz Kafka has been difficult with women because of the complications in his life (Gilman, 1995). Generally, Kafka mirrored himself to the main character of his story where he tried to battle with the society and labeled the negative things that modernization brings such as the symbolization of pornography in the story. The main plot revolves around the bureaucracy and how K. was challenged to face his failure falling in the hands of the government. Kafka tried to criticize the way the government practices its policies and hoped that the society will be enlightened to be able to see the anomalies in the government (Corngold et al., 2009). The reason why K. was caught did not take a chance to be revealed on the readers and was a mystery. It focused more on how a man was put in the possession of the court and cornered into an uncertain dilemma. The story of Josef K. ended when he was killed by agents in a quarry in accord to the name of law (Kafka, 1984). In relation with the emotional cycle of Kübler-Ross, K. made it significant to describe how a person accepts a failure in his life. The cycle is not limited to a dying patient and it also applies to the person who encounters a traumatic experience in his life. Mainly, the things that happened to K. were negative as how he perceived it in his life until the day that he died. He went through the stages of shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing and lastly learning to accept. He acted shocked at the early stages and showed the following stages of his grievances all throughout the story. Thus, it makes the thesis clear that the reactions of K. were significant enough to be an illustration of how the ideas of Kübler-Ross apply. The Grief Cycle Although the book of Kübler-Ross discusses grief at large for death and dying person, it vitally scopes the grief cycle in relation with different circumstances not only applicable to a dying person. A person is said to be in grief if there is something that makes a negative feeling. Grieving is a part of a being where it serves as the normal retort of a person to any kind of loss like losing a loved-one, break up on relationships, losing a job, hearing a bad news and other. People have different personalities and they have different ways of responding to an awful feeling. However, Kübler-Ross generalizes the cycles of how a person feels in the middle of grievance especially for a terminally-ill person (Kübler-Ross, 1969). First, a person will be in a shock stage where it is like being paralyzed upon hearing the news. One could not focus on the major problem and the tendency is to ignore the issue. Josef K. felt the same thing when he was arrested by the two agents without knowing why he was being caught. Although he also thought it was not real because he has done nothing wrong and it is unbelievable that the court was playing games on him upon his arrest. He felt angry upon realizing that the court is unfair and the bureaucracy was taking the endless case against him. The bargaining stage relates with his life when he tried to find help for the resolution of his case. He attempted to seek for the help of the lawyers but it seemed useless. His efforts were ineffective and just gave him false hopes so he ended up at the stage of depression (Kafka, 1984). The depression stage is where he was left helpless and his personality changed into a different man. He became desperate and anxious with many things but since he cannot find a shelter from his environment, he tried to help himself and stand for a realistic way on how to speak himself out. Hence, he used his position as a Senior Clerk of the bank to confer his way to end his dilemma. But eventually, he then realized that it is difficult to fight back into something that cannot be trodden. The cycle ends in the acceptance stage of the reason for grieving. K. accepted the case and his destiny. He submitted himself to the authority willingly without verifying the real point of the case. He did not contest the authenticity of the case and the violations made by the system of the law. Evidence that K. has learned acceptance was when he did not commit suicide as what was expected from him to do. The court was like setting him up to a helpless situation where he will just give up and surrender himself, but they failed and just killed him (Kafka, 1984). Conclusion Kafka showed how he took his last days on earth through his novel, The Trial. It significantly described the grief cycle discussed on the book of Kübler-Ross and explained how each stage is applied to the behavior of K. in the story. Technically, the cycle goes generic for the people who experience grief or a traumatic experience. Although Kübler-Ross primarily applies the ideas to a dying patient, it still makes a sensible way of understanding the steps how a person copes up with the emotional burden of his life. The life of K. can also be considered as if he is dying because all his hopes are diminishing until his last day of life. In the five stages, sometimes people get to be stuck with a particular most especially the denial and the depression stages. Denial is where someone tries to ignore the happening and act as if the dilemma does not exist. However, no matter how a person tries to act nonchalant, it will still prevail in the end and the best thing to do is to accept the fact that this particular event is inevitable. K. tried his best to resolve the case but the power of the court is difficult to handle. He went through the stages of death and dying and Kafka notably offered a great example of how these principles apply to a one’s life.   Works Cited Corngold, Stanley et. al., (eds.) Franz Kafka: The Office Writings. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009. Gilman, Sandler L. Franz Kafka,Tthe Jewish Patient. New York: Routledge, 1995. Kafka, Franz. The Trial. New York: Shocken Books, 1984. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying, Macmillan, NY, 1969 Read More