The Trial and Exposure

This article offers an interpretation of Roger Waters’ “The Trial” (The Wall, 1979) by comparing it with Franz Kafka’s The Trial and “The Judgment” and with Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Die Panne (commonly known as A Dangerous Game), in order to highlight the profound affinities among the four works in their representation of the trial as a process of exposure that leaves the defendant’s life stripped bare and laid open both to the gaze of others and to their own. Thus, whatever the verdict, the trial naturally culminates in shame; shame is therefore the necessary punishment of both the convicted and the acquitted