Poor Joseph K

At one point in Kafka's The Trial, Joseph K tells the student, Bertold, "I don't really know about your judicial system yet. . ." (63). The more we glimpse of this system through Joseph K's confusing confrontations with officials and bureaucracy, the harder it is to comprehend any of it.  It becomes something like an unsolvable riddle that Joseph K. tries to solve.  In the fourth chapter, when Joseph K. seeks out the offices of the judicial system in a tenement-like apartment complex, several metaphors, several possibilities, emerge at once: The law and its servants have behaved criminally, and Joseph K is the hero, pursuing the law, much the way he tried without success to pursue Bertold, the washerwoman's "little monster" (63). The 'little monster,' Bertold the law student will one day be a big monster, a judge, in much the same way totalitarianism and fascism begins as a little monster and becomes a big one. To use an earlier statement K. recalls in the story, "the court was attracted by guilt" (39), so it's possible that K. is attracted to justice.  This makes him questionable. Is he guilty of something? Why are the authorities interested in him? And why is he so interested in the authorities?  The last metaphor is conveyed in the dizzy spell K. experiences when he takes a tour of the law offices. Does it reflect his uneasiness with himself and with the law? Is his obsession with getting an understanding of this elusive riddle unhealthy for him? So far, we have no reason to believe he is the worst of people, but because of his life-style, we have no reason to believe he is the best. He probably is like the majority of people in the world, (especially men-- I think this dude is a bit of a chauvinist) somewhere in between. I think he is an average and harmless, person, but I have a feeling that the trial that Joseph K. has been forced to undergo in the story will take many of his freedoms away, at the same time that it leaves him in the position to become the best of people, or the worst. It will be an interesting metamorphosis.