52 pages • 1 hour read •
The Castle
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Themes
The Struggle Against Authority and Bureaucracy
The overarching theme of The Castle is K.’s struggle against an all-powerful yet unreachable authority and the impenetrable, totally illogical, convoluted bureaucracy of its workings. This is a common theme in Kafka’s works, found also in The Trial and Metamorphosis. The term “Kafkaesque” is commonly used to describe an overly complicated, frustrating battle with bureaucracy.
Both the Castle and the elusive director Klamm are physical representations of remote and unreachable power. The villagers live in the Castle’s shadow, and its influence pervades every aspect of their lives. Klamm is mentioned by almost every character, and his long reach can be felt radiating from the past, in the case of the landlady Gardena’s short relationship with him many years ago, through to the present, such as when Frieda returns to the taproom where Klamm will find her again at the story’s end. The villagers live in fear and awe of the Castle, and through fear of reprisal they turn against each other rather than showing solidarity together. This is reflected in how the community shuns Amalia’s family after she refuses to become Sortini’s a sexual plaything.
The inscrutable machinations of the bureaucratic processes that accompany the Castle’s power are expressed by many of the characters in interminable monologues that are often several pages long. The chairman admits that the administration he works for is needlessly complex and inefficient:
it can happen at some point one department issues an order, another a second, neither department knows of the other, the higher-ranking control agency is extremely precise, but by nature it intervenes a little too late, and so a little confusion can nonetheless arise (60).
Yet, in a contradiction typical of the Castle, the chairman later says, “of course, they aren’t meant to find errors, in the vulgar sense of the term, since no errors occur, and even if an error does occur, as in your case, who can finally say that it is an error” (65). The language used by Castle officials is obscure and officious, and designed to confuse and alienate the listener, especially the villagers or peasants, as they are often called. The chairman’s discourse exemplifies this perfectly. For example, when describing the “official apparatus,” which is “extremely sensitive” (68), he says:
When a matter has been deliberate don at great length, it can happen, even before the deliberations have ended, that suddenly, like lightning, in some unforeseeable place, which cannot be located later on, a directive is issued that usually justly, but nonetheless arbitrarily, brings the matter to a close (68).
As a work of modernist literature, a style that emerged in response to the devastation and destabilization wrought by World War I, The Castle reflects a shaken faith in authority and its ability to protect and support the people. The chairman’s remarks are recursive, contradictory, and ultimately meaningless; they convey nothing and do nothing to assist K. in his effort to meet Klamm or arrive at the Castle, echoing how governmental authority proved futile in preventing unprecedented tragedy during the war.
The villager Olga, in her extremely long description of her brother Barnabas’s attempt to become an employee of the Castle, also expresses the incoherent workings of the Castle authorities. She remarks that “the terrible thing is that one never knows what this slowness means; it can mean that the official procedure has begun, but it can also mean that the official procedure has not yet even begun, […] but finally, it can also mean that the official procedure is already over” (173). The Castle’s processes are inscrutable to the villagers, and they have no way to make sense of its workings or to affect positive, productive change, which again reflects the average individual’s sense of powerlessness in the interwar period.
The final example in the book is Bürgel’s monologue, which helps send K. to sleep as it is so meaningless and dense. Bürgel’s message is that he can help K., but by this point K. is exhausted and has all but given up the fight against bureaucracy and is no longer able to pay attention. Thus, he loses his final opportunity.
Power and the Class Divide
The Castle’s depiction of the disparity between the powerful and the powerless serves as a sharp condemnation of authority. The distance between the officials in the Castle and the villagers, or peasants, is a clear representation of the gap between classes. The physical locations of both groups, with the Castle above and the village below, symbolizes the chasm between them. The Castle is so removed from the village that the villagers can rarely ascend. When they do, they do not share in the Castle’s wealth or power; they are allowed entry only to fulfil some menial task, like how Barnabas delivers letters as a messenger. The officials, or gentlemen, do descend to the village but are then hidden and protected behind locked doors at the Gentlemen’s Inn. Thus, they are rarely seen by the villagers, who must wait as long as it takes for a meeting at an official’s whim, just as K. waits to see Erlanger at the end of the book. The officials, like Klamm, are spoken of as sensitive, but this is not reflected by reality. As K. details, the peasants have “bulging lips, open mouths, and almost tortured faces—their heads looked as if they had been beaten flat on top and their features shaped in the pain of the beating” (22). Their physical appearance reveals how the ruling class treats them, by beating them into submission. Another motif that depicts the difference between the classes is the cognac that K. finds in the official’s sleigh at the Gentlemen’s Inn: “the smell was so sweet, so pleasing, so much like praise and kind words from someone whom you’re very fond of, though you don’t quite know what it is all about […] And this is supposed to be cognac?” (103) The alcohol is so fine that it is utterly unlike anything K., as a lowly villager, has ever encountered, such that he does not even recognize the liquid for what it is.
The story of Olga’s family’s treatment at the hands of the officials highlights the gap between the classes and the villagers’ total lack of power against the Castle. One way that the officials exert power is by summoning young women who refuse to conduct sexual favors. For some women, this is an honor, as in Gardena’s relationship with Klamm. Frieda’s behavior throughout the story also seems motivated by her importance as Klamm’s mistress, and Pepi aims for the same fate. However, Amalia exemplifies what happens when this abuse of power is repudiated. Of this power imbalance, Olga says:
No should one forget the great distance between an official and a shoemaker’s daughter, which must somehow be bridged, […] True, they say that all of us belong to the Castle and that there’s no distance between them and us, […] but unfortunately we had a chance to see that when everything is at stake it isn’t that way at all (196).
The aftermath of Amalia’s rejection of Sortini demonstrates just how untrue this is, as the family is shunned entirely. Olga recounts, “People simply withdrew. The people here as well as at the Castle. We hadn’t noticed the Castle caring beforehand, so how could we now notice a complete change. The silence was the worst” (207). She pinpoints the villagers’ motive: “It was only out of fear that they had done so” (207)—fear that they would incur a similar fate if they defied the Castle by associating with the family. The Castle’s refusal to forgive, rejecting begging and even bribes, emphasizes its lack of empathy and compassion. It does not understand the peasant’s plight, nor does it care to. As Olga notes, “in his own area an official can on hearing a single word at once dart through complete trains of thought, but if someone explains cases for another department to him for hours on end, he may nod politely, but he won’t understand a word” (216).
While there are two distinct classes, the Castle officials and the villagers, there is also another group that belongs in the middle: the servants of the officials. These are possibly villagers who have ascended but still remain peasants in some ways. Sortini’s messenger, who was the actual recipient of Amalia’s wrath and whom Olga and Barnabas sought as their last resort in the chance for redemption, is one such servant. Of them, Olga says, “Of course one servant resembles the next” (221), suggesting that they have sacrificed individuality for a taste of the Castle’s privilege and power. The servants exist on both levels: they “are the true masters at the Castle; they certainly do know how to appreciate that and while they are at the Castle, while they must move about under its laws, they are calm and dignified” (222). However, when they come to the village, these servants are transformed, “having turned into a wild unruly horde, governed not by the laws but by their insatiable drives” (222), and consumed by lust and greed.
In fact, base desires reveal a tenuousness to the divide between the officials and servants and the villagers. At the Gentlemen’s Inn, Frieda must drive the servants into the barn with a stick, and Olga later describes some officials in animalistic terms: “there are some officials who very much against their own will love the smell of that sort of wild game, and during admission exams they sniff the air, twist their mouths, roll their eyes” (224). This description, along with the constant undercurrent of sexual lust that drives the officials toward the village girls, implies that the class divide exists only because the villagers accept the Castle’s authority as the status quo. Sexual drives and human appetites are in fact the great levelers between the classes.
Finding Meaning in a Meaningless World
While Kafka’s work is difficult to place squarely within any one artistic movement, it displays strong elements that align it with surrealist philosophy. This movement, which flourished between the 1920s and 1950s, is based on the blurring of the lines between conscious and unconscious perception, and the representation of this through surprise, juxtaposition, and illogical and irrational images. The novel also contains elements of existentialism, which complements surrealism in its rejection of the rational and logical, and emphasizes individual perception and the search for meaning in a post-religious world.
K.’s ordeal in The Castle can certainly be considered a quest for meaning and purpose that proves futile and fruitless, as he instead becomes entrenched in an increasingly surreal world. K. is introduced as a staunchly logical character who has faith in the Castle’s bureaucracy. However, his certainty that he was summoned by the Castle, and that the error regarding his employment will be ironed out in due course, wanes as he encounters an incongruous chain of events incited by characters who constantly contradict themselves and each other. The assistants’ absurd antics throughout most of the book are the comedic representation of this incongruity. The fact that K. never realizes that they have adopted these ridiculous personas purely to entertain him—that their conduct is an act—demonstrates how his sense of reality becomes less solid as his situation grows increasingly absurd. He eventually succumbs to this surreal environment and no longer reacts with surprise when he is offered lodging with people he barely knows, after being thrown out of every place where he felt he had a right to be. The landlady’s completely unprecedented offer to make him her wardrobe consultant, which K. accepts, is the ultimate example of how K. relinquishes logic, succumbs to the futility of his quest, and ultimately embraces his new reality.
Even the novel’s prose reflects K.’s weakening grasp on logic. The narration is at times concrete and realistic, but at others absurd and surreal. The futility of K.’s uphill battle is conveyed with a tone that is often humorous, often dark. In particular, K.’s struggle against a meaningless system reflects the struggle of such characters as Albert Camus’s Sisyphus and the protagonist of The Stranger by the same writer. Such figures, like K., feel alienated from society and from God, and must find a reason to continue living despite the inherent absurdity of life. This sense of alienation can possibly be traced to Kafka’s questioning of his Jewish faith as well as the struggle to survive in the anti-semitic Germany of the 1920s. In The Castle, K. is progressively estranged from those around him, with even the supposedly loyal Frieda betraying him. He stands alone against all these forces—the Castle, the officials, the villagers—and realizes his fight is unsustainable. In the end, K. surrenders to this absurd world, accepting all that comes his way.
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