Whenever figures in the novels have anything to say to K., no matter how important or surprising it may be, they do so casually and with the implication that he must really have known it all along. It is as though nothing new was being imparted, as though the hero was just being subtly invited to recall to mind something that he had forgottten. (Walter Benjamin in Franz Kafka, On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death)
This is how Willy Haas has interpreted the course of events in The Trial and rightly so. ‘The object of the trial’, he writes, ‘indeed, the real hero of this incredible book is forgetting, whose main characteristic is the forgetting of itself… Here it has actually become a mute figure in the shape of the accused man, a figure of the most striking intensity’.