The Castle

“It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay under deep snow. There was no sign of the Castle hill, fog and darkness surrounded it, not even the faintest gleam of light suggested the Castle.”

The protagonist K. arrives at the village at the very beginning of the book. The mysterious and forbidding image of the Castle in the dark foreshadows the ominous and unreachable power that its authority holds and that forms the central theme of the book.

“‘I want to be free at all times.’

‘You don’t know the Castle,’ the landlord said softly.”

K. ask the Bridge Inn landlord about what he can expect in terms of pay from the Castle. He states his wish not to live up at the Castle and expresses his desire for independence. The landlord’s reply is a warning, a foreshadowing of the events to come whereby K. will lose all sense of freedom and find his life inseparable from the workings of the Castle and its authorities.

“The tower up here—it was the only one in sight—the tower of a residence, as now became evident, possibly of the main Castle, was a monotonous round building, in part mercifully hidden by ivy, with little windows that glinted in the sun—there was something crazy about this—and ending in a kind of terrace, whose battlements, uncertain, irregular, brittle, as if drawn by the anxious or careless hand of a child, zigzagged into the blue sky.”

K. explores the village the morning after his arrival and sees the Castle in daylight. The description includes words like “crazy,” “anxious,” “uncertain,” and “brittle.” This choice of adjectives to describe a solid old building is unusual and foreshadows the incomprehensible nature of the Castle’s workings and the incongruous events that will befall K. This quote also exemplifies the long sentences characteristic of Kafka’s writing. The original text lacks much punctuation, but the translator of this edition added punctuation to make it easier to read.

“‘Cause for a slight attack of despair’ was the thought that came to him, ‘if I were only here by accident, not on purpose.’”

After being physically thrown out of the first village house by the unfriendly inhabitants, and then meeting two men who ignore his request to take him to the inn with them, K. experiences his first moment of insecurity about being in the Castle environment.

“The ‘No’ of the answer reached K. at his table, but the answer was more explicit, it went, ‘neither tomorrow nor any other time.’”

K. asks his assistant to call by telephone for permission to go to the Castle. The answer he receives resounds with finality. However, K. decides to call himself. This is K.’s first experience with the telephone as a means of communication with the Castle, and thus begins his frustrating and pointless battle to speak to the Castle authorities. The Castle has already shown its intransigence, but K. does not give up easily.

“[T]heir heads looked as if they had been beaten flat on top and their features shaped in the pain of the beating.”

K. meets Barnabas for the first time and compares him, with his fine silky clothes and wide open smile, to the peasants who surround them. This image of the villagers depicts them with physical features that reflect the psychological beatings they receive as subservient victims of the Castle’s pervasive authority.

“Undoubtedly these were contradictions, so obvious they must be intentional.”

K. reflects on the first letter he receives from Klamm. The contradictions he mentions include the fact that he is addressed as a free man and a lowly worker at different points. K. still believes in the logic and transparency of authority at this point, but this passage is an early indication that K. is entering a world where things do not follow a rational course.

“When this gaze descended on K., it seemed to him to be a gaze that had already decided matters concerning him, whose existence he himself still knew nothing about, but of whose existence that gaze now convinced him.” 

This is the moment when K. first meets the barmaid Frieda in the Gentlemen’s Inn. K. has a prescient feeling that she has intentions regarding him. As their relationship develops, it is never quite clear whether she targets K. to get at Klamm or whether she truly feels for him, though characters like Pepi consider her scheming and ambitious.

“Hours passed there, hours breathing together with a single heartbeat, hours in which K. constantly felt he was lost or had wandered further into foreign lands than any human being before him, so foreign that even the air hadn’t a single component of the air in his homeland and where one would inevitably suffocate from the foreignness but where the meaningless enticements were such that one had no alternative but to go on and get even more lost.”

K. spends his first night with Frieda on the taproom floor, rolling around in the beer puddles in an intoxicating sexual union. Their lovemaking seems exciting but also causes feelings of suffocation, alienation, and fear in K. From this moment, he is tied to Frieda and must continue his journey into the foreign and meaningless land of the Castle.

“I’m not denying it’s possible to accomplish something that runs absolutely counter to the rules and the old traditions, I myself have never experienced anything of the sort, but such instances are said to occur.”

The landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn insists on speaking to K. about important matters. She explains that it is very difficult to get an interview with Klamm and warns K. that he knows nothing of how the system works. Her words here are another warning of the challenges to come for K.

“They only had to defend distant and invisible causes on behalf of remote an invisible gentlemen, whereas he, K., was fighting for something vitally close, for himself.”

K. thinks about how easy it is to deal with the authorities before meeting the chairman. He is still optimistic and sees the situation in a rational and straightforward way. However, his thoughts presage the truth: distant, invisible, remote—these ideas become reality in a most threatening and frustrating way as the story develops.

“However, this reply seems never to have reached the first department—which I shall call A—and went to another department, B. So, Department A was left without an answer, and unfortunately B didn’t receive our entire answer: either because the contents of the file never left us, or because the file itself got lost on the way—though certainly not in the department itself, I’ll vouch for that.”

At the meeting with K., the chairman explains the procedures of the Castle bureaucracy and the resulting loss of K.’s file in great but ultimately confusing and contradictory detail. His descriptions depict the inefficiency of the system and the chaos that ensues.

“When a matter has been deliberated on at great length, it can happen, even before the deliberations have ended, that suddenly, like lightning, in some unforeseeable place, which cannot be located further on, a directive is issued that usually justly, but nonetheless arbitrarily, brings the matter to a close.”

The chairman continues his extended monologue about the workings of the Castle’s bureaucracy. His speech demonstrates the recursive, contradictory, longwinded style of pontificating that is characteristic of Castle officials. This absurd, nonsensical description becomes reality for K.

“Anyone whom he no longer summons, he forgets, not only for the past but for all time.”

At their second meeting, the landlady tells K. of her relationship with Klamm 20 years ago and the heartbreak it caused her. Here she refers to Klamm’s cold, dismissive nature, contradicting earlier characterizations that described Klamm as “sensitive.”

“But within his sphere of influence he seems to want to arrive at a truly generous temporary settlement, which you are free to accept or reject, he is offering you temporarily the post of school janitor.”

After the chairman tells K. he is not required as a surveyor, the teacher passes on the message that he is offering K. the janitor’s post. This is a probationary, unpaid post, but it gives K. and Frieda somewhere to live. K. is initially reluctant, but Frieda persuades him to take it.

“When K. looked at the Castle, it was at times as if he were watching someone who sat there calmly, gazing into space, not lost in thought and therefore cut off from everything, but free and untroubled; as if he were alone, unobserved.”

K. looks at the Castle as he walks toward the Gentlemen’s Inn hoping to find Klamm. The Castle is personified as an unperturbed, impervious human force, master of all he surveys and untouched by the troubles he causes to those subservient beneath him. Klamm displays those same characteristics in real life.

“He considered Klamm’s remoteness, his impregnable abode, his muteness, broken perhaps by shouts the likes of which K. had never heard before, his piercing downturned gaze, which could never be proved, never be refuted, and his, from K.’s position below, indestructible circles, which he was describing up there in accordance with incomprehensible laws, visible only for seconds—all this Klamm and the eagle had in common.” 

After K. refuses to give his deposition to Momus, Klamm’s secretary, the landlady admonishes K. and warns him that he should have done it, for Klamm’s power is absolute. K. reflects on her comparison of Klamm to an eagle and realizes that the metaphor is valid. K. is becoming more aware of Klamm’s power.

“He wanted to spare Frieda as much as possible, for she had ambition, he had none, she was sensitive, he was not, her thoughts centered exclusively on the minor abominations of the present, his on Barnabas and the future.” 

K. and Frieda are in the school gymnasium, where they will spend the night, but the assistants, who never leave them alone, are also present. After the intrusion of one of the assistants into their bed and the resulting debacle, where Frieda shows too much sympathy to the assistant K. hits, K. reflects on Frieda’s personality. He still favors her, despite questioning her loyalty. This loyalty is soon tested with the woodshed incident. After she again displays divided loyalties, K. reassesses Frieda, determining that she has ambition and is not as simple a person as he initially believed.

“There they ran up and down, holding onto the fence, then halted, and stretched their hands beseechingly towards K. They kept this up a long time, despite the futility of their efforts; it was as if they were blind, and they probably didn’t even stop when K. lowered the curtains to get them out of his sight.” 

K. throws the assistants out of the schoolroom after they cause his sacking as a janitor. This scene depicts their typical farcical behavior, which is their defining feature throughout most of the story. Jeremias later reveals that they were employed to cheer K. up, but here he perceives them as stupid and useless. K. has no inkling that this absurdity is just an act.

“I dream there’s no tranquil place on earth for our love in the village or anywhere else, so I picture a deep and narrow grave where we embrace each other as if with clamps, I hide my face in you, you hide yours in me, and nobody will ever see us again.”

K. questions Frieda about her loyalty to him after she defends the assistants’ innocence over his in the woodshed incident. This is part of her reply to K. She is passionate and romantic and states her desire to be alone with him, even using the imagery of dying together. Soon after, their conversation returns to Klamm, and K. claims that Frieda is still his mistress and not K.’s wife.

“His stubbornness is exemplary.”

These few words say a lot about K.’s character. He is commenting on the assistant, who remains at the fence outside the schoolyard, exhausted but not surrendering his hope of being allowed back in to the building. Despite K.’s disdain for and suspicion of the assistants, at this point he admires the one who remains and wonders if he himself has the same staying power. At this point, K. is deeply embroiled in the battle to be reinstated as the surveyor and realizes how much tenacity is required to fight the Castle.

“Official decisions are as shy as young girls.”

Olga tells K. that this is a local expression. She is referring to Barnabas waiting to get his official suit for his messenger post. K. spends his whole arc in The Castle waiting for such official decisions. However, this phrase has much greater significance. It connects the power of authority to its frequent victim: the young girls who are summoned for sexual favors by officials, such as in the case of Olga’s sister Amalia and the official Sortini.

“Respect for the authorities is innate here, and then it’s instilled in you throughout your lives in many different ways and from all sides, and you yourselves help this along as best you can.”

K. has listened to Olga explain what Barnabas told her about his role as messenger and what he sees at the Castle. However, K. tells her Barnabas’s word cannot be trusted as he is too young for the post. K. goes on to comment on the villagers’ respect for the Castle and their credulity toward what they hear. This extract is a comment on the manipulation of the lower classes by the ruling classes, who maintain power through indoctrination and misinformation, and keep the masses in servitude.

“You shouldn’t let those disappointments frighten you off. Here some things seem to be arranged in such a way as to frighten people off, and when one is new to the place those obstacles seem absolutely impenetrable.” 

This is part of the Bürgel’s long speech in his room at the Gentlemen’s Inn, which K. enters by accident while looking for Erlanger, who has summoned him. Bürgel is sympathetic to K., the first official to be so, and offers to help him. His discourse is obscure and convoluted as all official discourse, but he offers K. concrete hope. This extract shows that he is aware of K.’s tribulations, although he downplays them and it is not clear if he is being honest. Nonetheless, K. has lost all hope and is too weary to stay awake and take advantage of this last-minute offer.