Adaptation of K's death from Kafka to Welles

I believe the best place to demonstrate the truth of Naremore's feelings on Welles is K's death scene. In the original novel, K's last words on his own death reflect its dehumanizing effects: "Like a dog," he cries (Kafka). In Welles' reimagining of this scene, K laughs in bitter triumph just before his death that no matter what they put him through, he will not choose death. In contrast to the shameful knifing in the heart of the original, the movie's K dies in a blast of dynamite with the force of a firework's display set to emotional music. In this way, Welles reframes Kafka's ignoble snuffing out of K's life into a sort of heroic moral victory over K's oppressors.

Speaking of K's oppressors, while the novel leaves them shadowy, Welles reframes the girls who bombard him before his visit with Titorelli into a horde of watchers who make concrete the court's hold over him. The primary manifestation of the court's omnipotence is, characteristically, Welles himself, playing as in Touch of Evil a character where Welle's intimidating physical size and presence is key. Kafka's preoccupation with shadowy, sinister bureaucracy is transformed into Welle's particular obsession with personal power and its decay: the powerful figure of the lawyer is shown in the twilight of his influence, confined for the most part to his bed while the sexually charged figure of Leni hovers discontentedly around him. This mirrors the Xanadu scenes in Citizen Kane where Susan Alexander plays a waning Kane's unwilling satellite.

Moving back specifically to the death scene, however, it is preceded directly by a repetition of the parable with which Welle's begins the movie. This gives the movie a sense of unity between beginning and end that is similar to Citizen Kane's use of the unifying motif of Rosebud. Using the parable as the movie's beginning and penultimate scene brings home the notion that the parable mirrors the plot of The Trial. Whereas in Kafka's version there is a discussion of the parable in which both K and the priest make points about the story's meaning, Welles' version excises much of the priest's commentary and dwells upon K's line that that accepting everything the doorkeeper says as necessary rather than true "turns lying into a universal principle" (Kafka). This reframing focuses on K's resistance to the opression of the law instead of the very hopelessness of resistance as Kafka does. Throughout the novel, Kafka mocks each attempt K makes to resist his fate, starting with his speech during his interrogation. While Welles maintains that scene, he fails to allow it to become a universal pattern throughout K's trial. He maintains K's human dignity in the face of all his adversity; instead of being dehumanized in death, K dies while laughing in the face of all he's encountered and thus remains a human, somewhat heroic figure who has stood for the innocent and good in the "Wellesian morality play" (Naremore).