…they’re not intended to detect mistakes in the vulgar sense of the word, since there are no mistakes,
It will not go unnoticed, by a reader who has had a chance to consume one of Kafka’s other works such as The Trial or The metamorphosis, that the subtitle is incomplete and the reader is likely to understand the analogue when he or she reads The Castle by Kafka. The castle is the story of a man called K( immediately seen similar to the protaganist of The Trial) who is a stranger(to the backdrop) that comes to a village on being recruited as a land surveyor. As the story unfolds, or in this case, becomes thicker with layers of oppression, bureaucracy and aloofness, K , who seemed to be quite assertive at first, slowly becomes part of the illusion of the castle.
As is noted in the English translation published by Oxford, it would be too narrow to just consider the work as an example of ‘Kafkaesque’ texts. The castle is more clear, even somewhat more hopeful (though this can be my own perception) than The Trial and Metamorphosis. In this work, the protagonist seems to be capable of love and is able to assert his feelings over his then context, even if only incidentally. Kafka’s writing is coherent, but full of puzzles and intentionally fallacious logic that actively engages the reader in his work. The constancy of man’s struggle with a higher form or object , in both negating the form or cherishing it, is imbued in the reader as he turns the pages and sure enough, as is true with all the works of Kafka that I’ve read, he or she is given no real comfort or closure. This superiority of an ambiguous authority figure, which may or may not have real control, is demonstrated to be obvious or natural and all other ways of living are deemed unnatural or unthinkable.
Kafka, through his pen, has once again succeeded, even with a partial work, to create a world that at first is difficult to even comprehend but slowly becomes threateningly obvious.
The castle is a must read for readers who can bear to live without closure.
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