This is Franz Kafka’s last novel, an unfinished novel before his death, that is different from the other “Kafkaesque” style that any reader of Kafka will be familiar with.
It is a story about a small village, ruled by an administrative staff of a castle on top of the hill, a property owned by an absent nobleman. The story follows around the protagonist (simply named “K”), an outsider coming to the village as a land surveyor. When inspecting the remote village deep in winter, he soon discovers the weird way life is organized around the mysterious castle (which he cannot access). But everything else in the village can be accessed and this is where the story evolve around, the investigation.
It is quite a departure from Kafka’s other novels, which often rely on small bunch of strong characters in his stories. Instead, in The Castle the characters are plentiful with intricate relationships, but yet they are still neatly characterized, so much so that even those who appear only briefly – such as the village schoolmaster, the schoolmistress, and her suitor – they still have a strong presence.
In the story, K learns that the village is a community that has deep ties between friendships and hatreds that go back years into several generations. The village has two inns: 1. Bridge Inn (operated by humble people) 2. Castle Inn (the more pretentious one); with interesting stories how the owners acquired them. And among many other notable characters, K meets the families of the tanner Lasemann and the cobbler Brunswick and learn about their standing in the village, and has an interaction with the castle messenger, Barnabas, and his family, whom all have bad odor because of their resistance attitude towards the castle.
The novel sees authority differently from Kafka’s previous novels. Instead of one controlling abusing figurehead (which creates the Kafkaesque world) The Castle dwells on various different kinds of authority without a clear figurehead, which clearly showed in the way the castle is being operated.
For example, it is said that the castle is owned by Count Westwest, a mysterious figure whom we will never meet. In his absence, the castle is operated by a big staff of bureaucrats, which are arranged in a strict hierarchy. This is where the book excels, finding stories in between the bureaucratic confusion and inefficiency. Moreover, besides political power, the castle (and its staff) also bizarrely receive religious devotion from the villagers. Both of these examples have ignited plenty of interpretations from well known philosophers and critics alike of what the castle really symbolizes.
For context, Kafka wrote The Castle in a turbulent time in history, just after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires. And thus his tone of writing was partly influenced by the then-contemporary zeitgeist of a new movement, that ask the question of what replaces the traditional monarch authority (i.e. the figurehead at the top). Hence, the analogy of an empty castle at the top.
This is what makes the book so good, despite being unfinished and thus with an ending that will forever be mysterious. All the open-ended symbolisms and the many possible interpretations, as well as K’s search for meaning and connection to society throughout the journey (not to mention his attempt to access the empty castle), still become the subject of inspiration and debate until this day.
THE CHAOS THEORY 