Much ink has been spilled parsing out Kafka's unfinished final novel. Ready-made allegories applied to the book seem to fall apart on one detail or another. Perhaps K's fruitless journey to the titular Castle is a religious metaphor? Or a commentary on the state and bureaucracy? Perhaps the Castle is Lacan's objet a? Maybe K.'s journey is an allegory for growing up, for life itself? Or maybe the Castle is meant to represent one of Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects - too huge to comprehend, yet entwined with everyone and everything in the village?
My take is that it is none of these. "The Castle" as an allegory is as incomprehensible as its titular subject. It is quintessentially Kafka. The narrative comes second to the metanarrative, to the feeling of walking alongside K., of trying to understand the machinations of The Castle, of wading through deeper and deeper snowdrifts. The feeling of reading this book is the point; it is a book where the words on the page are merely there to facilitate an experience. As K.'s plight becomes more and more hopeless the pacing slows down. We get pages and pages of dialogue that, ultimately, have no bearing on the story. Characters contradict each other, and themselves (often in the same breath). The already bleak world of the village feels as though it's closing in. A cloying darkness, a meticulously described haze, a constant stream of ultimately unimportant detail. The confusion, the frustration, the unsolvable puzzle at the heart of "The Castle" is the crux of the novel. Indeed, Kafka himself found the maze he constructed so labyrinthian that he famously could not finish the book; reportedly throwing down his pen in frustration mid-sentence and writing to his long-time friend Max Brod "I have not spent this past week very cheerfully, for I have had to give up the Castle story, evidently for good."1
Ironically, I cannot envision a more appropriate way to end the story of K. than to leave it cut short.
It's a cliche to say that a book must be experienced, but in this case, it is true. K. is not the subject - you are. The Castle is a particular conception of life - absurd, incomprehensible, liquid, and shifting into a new form just as the edges of the old are found. Reality has always been fluid, but the advent of the Enlightenment and the ensuing 300 years of thought have fooled us into thinking it is quantifiable; that it is measurable. This is hubris, and Kafka understood, nay, felt this on a level that few others have before or since. His bureaucratic systems are almost humorous in their nonsensicality, but they are never as far away from reality as they first appear.
Footnotes
Kafka, F. (1998). The Castle (M. Harman, Trans.). Schocken Books; Afterword to the German Critical Edition. ↩