Franz Kafka - The Castle

Everyone has experienced that infuriating feeling when you call a customer helpline and the never ending series of ‘press one if you want this’ ‘press two if you want that’ and none of them have what you are looking for as an option. So then you start pressing random buttons before finally talking to a human voice who has no idea what you are talking about and starts a series of never ending series of transfers, speaking to one person to explain the problem only to be told you need to speak to the manager, who then says its the wrong department, and so it all starts again. This nightmare of beauracracy and legislation is essentially what Kafka’s castle is about. Except it is more confusing. K. The protaganist has no idea why he even needs to call the helpline, and the phone he has no buttons, and the buttons change, and doesn’t even make sense.

The essential basis of the plot is that K. has been summoned to the castle and once he gets there has to try and make contact with the authorities in the castle. Yet, he is constantly thrawted in his attempts, as K. is situated in the village beneath the castle it we have a forboding image, the castle looming constantly over K. a powerful symbol of authority. Protected with a never ending complex system of beauracy with multiple secretaries and paperwork that has K. stumbling to try and gain access. the system is seen as flawless yet it was a flaw that brought K. to the village in the first place. It is the story of alienation, the frustration of modern beaucracy and mans frustrated attempts to fight the system.

The style of the book is very fragmented, the characters shift and change, events break up, in a dream like fashion. The events are often illogical and meaningless, and what was insignificant latter becomes crucial. All these creates an atmosphere of tension and uncertainty. We become as confused as K. is in the situation. The dream seems more like a broken nightmare.

The bizare world that K is subjected to he freely participates in, K. is always free to leave the village and never forced or compelled to follow the castles strange laws. K. could leave the village but instead engages and adheres to the strange and crazy protocols and rules of the castle. K. sees himself fighting against the system but in his fight he follows the rules dictates to him by the system and in so doing he creates and sustains the system. The message is that each of us finds ourself in a a bewildering world full of rules that make no sense to us, K. in the end subjects himself to them, in order to gain acceptance in the village. Sadly, kafka died before completing the book, yet MAx Brod said that he had intended that K. was to die in the village as he finally was granted permission to live there. This for me makes the point that a theme of the book is that K. was buying into the beaurocracy in order to gain acceptance, his original quest became secondary and all that mattered was for him to follow the rules. The Castle is as much a thought experiment, where K. is presented with situations rather then a clear narrative and character development. The result is a book that makes one think but can also be difficult to follow with its fractured development.