The Castle

“The Castle” is one of Franz Kafka's most famous works and one of the deepest philosophical novels of the 20th century. It was left unfinished by the writer and was first published after his death in 1926 by his friend Max Brod. The plot of “The Castle” is absurd, yet at the same time plausible: a land surveyor named K. arrives in a certain village and attempts to enter the Castle, which he is not allowed to do. The complex system of bureaucracy becomes a tangled knot that has no possibility of being unraveled, and thus there is no possibility of entering the Castle, no matter how convoluted the paths taken. But the satire on the bureaucratic system is only one of the subtexts of the novel. The entire artistic space is limited to the Village and the inaccessible Castle. Time flows irrationally here. “The Castle” is primarily a metaphor through which glimpses of reality shine through. The Castle is quite concrete, and at the same time, it is a mirage. Perhaps the road to it is the road to God, and the Village is merely a prototype of our earthly world?