To all of you who have read the book

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You can view his guilt as whatever you like. One possibility: the marxist approach. Josef K. is just a member of the bourgeouis society and his guilt is simply living and being a part of that bourgeouis capitalist lifestyle. There's no real answer anyway.

He isn't guilty of anything specific... but is put on trial anyway. Everyone feels guilty about something...that's the absurdity of the book/movie. Being in a situation over which you don't understand and have no control is what is being described. The fear, anxiety, confusion, anger, & helplessness is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. Trying to rationally explain something that is irrational is the theme of the movie.

He is accused because he is attractive.

It’s a conspiracy of jealous, ugly, lecherous judges to rid the world of attractive men, thereby eliminating the competition for the attentions of women. In both the novel and the film, the advocate states that the accused are attractive. While he speculates the possible cause for the attractiveness of accused men (notice that all the accused are indeed men), be it guilt or whatever, he says that you can always spot an accused man within a crowd because they are the most attractive. Could it not be therefore suggested that they are not attractive because they are accused, but rather they are accused because they are attractive?

The priest accuses K of depending too much upon the help of women, to whom it would indeed be useless to take recourse if the women were the objective of the lecherous judges and therefore the reason the accused were being eliminated. K indeed retorts that the examining magistrate is a lecher who would scramble to get his hands on a woman.

In the arena of sexual competition within any society, ugly men wield whatever power they have to gain advantage over attractive men, be it money, political intrigue, or fame. So in Joseph K’s society, these ugly judges use the power of the legal system to eliminate their competition.

K particularly feels this defeat by the powers of the law when the law student carries the court usher's wife up to the examining magistrate, when K himself wanted to enter sexual relations with her. In the novel he explicitly refers to this as a defeat, as though success or failure in the sexual arena were inextricably linked with his court case.

Just a possibility.

Lots of people have different interpretations of the why and how in this story. There are people who have invested lots of time in studying this work and the life of Kafka himself. I've readthe book and seen the movie. Love both but I see them as essentially different in their approach to the subject matter.

I came to know the work of Kafka through this movie of Welles. I haven't studied Kafka, but to me it seems that in his book he doesn't blame K. for his inaptitude and stubborness, but that he sees society or the bureaucracy to blame for it. Welles clearly states the guilt of K. in the light of his passiveness and unwillingness to look past himself.

I see the story as an allegory of totaliarism. The status and prestige are very important in such societies, wherein people are judged by their covers and not their content. Appearance is everything and rumours can be death sentences. Welles regards K. as guilty in our modern nuclear age wherein a Holocaust was even possible (well, just prior to it). On the one hand K. is a victim of the bureaucratic society simply due to his carelesness and stubborness, while on the other hand K. is guilty because he turns away and blames everything and everyone but himself. K. is very self oriented and hasn't got eyes for what happens around him: hence the possibillity of the occurence of the Holocaust.

Still, everyone has got a different reading and that what makes this story so lasting.

The core of the story's audacity was that there was no charge. They told him it was secret before he finally arrived at the conclusion that there was no charge to speak of and that they simply wanted to show the legal system in action to the public by picking a random guy off the street and putting him through the wringer.

The nightmarish point of the story was how the gears of bureaucracy were being used to subdue and humiliate the masses, granting them the illusion of access to the law and the rights it granted. In effect, it turned people into zombies who lived at the behest of the state as either the accused or the yet-to-be accused--who were juxtaposed by the Judge and Advocate aristocracy created by the courts. K was unique in that he rejected their largess and closed his door that lead to the law.

They neither expected nor wanted him to walk to his death. That's why they had so much trouble working up the gumption to execute him in the end. For if everyone rejected the bureaucracy as he had done, they'd lose out on their racket.

There are two answers. One is that he never finds out what he was accused of. The other answer is that he was accused of being alive. Read the book. The movie is a cliche, the book is one of the most universal statements on human life.