This authority can represent many things but the basic dynamic of guilt remains the same. K's guilt is an issue of status, for he suffers practically no consequences other than embarrassment before his peers. K's overwhelming concern with his innocence is not prompted by a fear of punishment. Punishment has almost no connection with guilt until the very end when K is murdered. It is almost assumed that the status of guilt is the punishment itself.
Punishment comes only when guilt is accepted.
K's passive acceptance of his excutioners at the end of the novel symoblizes the acceptance of his own guilt. For some, this murder is seen as an act of atonement. One wonders if K would have been 'redeemed' if he had taken the knife to himself. Some have read this as the summation of Kafka's view of guilt. Man suffers from an unknown but valid guilt, the resolution of which is not the defiant and prideful act of demanding acquittal or establishing one's innocence, but an act of atonement through utter self sacrifice.