Kafka's style is a curious mix of matter-of-fact reporting and bizarre, fantasy-like subject matter. The Trial does not have a human being mutate into an insect as in The Metamorphosis, but its atmosphere is equally bizarre in its own way.

Kafka's prose, as stated, drily recounts events that make no sense. When Josef K. is confronted by the officers and told he is under arrest, his reaction is strangely muted and inappropriate (like the behavior of the police), in spite of his knowing that the situation is absurd. Kafka creates the atmosphere of a dream. The term usually used to describe this type of writing is, of course, surrealism. This implies that the literary style is one that reaches above, or beyond, photographic realism to depict a higher reality: a kind of meta-universe. In a dream, the dreamer generally does not react to the absurdity of the situations in the way one would do in ordinary, conscious experiences. Josef K.'s reactions are not only those of a dreamer, but of a man who seems unsurprised at the meaninglessness of life. In some ways Kafka prefigures the existentialist writings of Camus and Sartre. Just as Meursault in The Stranger narrates his story (including a murder) in an indifferent, resigned tone, the third-person narrative of The Trial is curiously detached—combining elements of ordinary life with absurdities—as if these different elements fit together perfectly when, in fact, there is a severe disconnect between them. Kafka exploits this jarring mixture to impress upon the reader a sense of being cut loose from ordinary reality and cast adrift in a cosmos in which events are deliberately nonsensical.