Additional Note
At this point, which indicates an important, probably a decisive defeat for the hero, Franz Kafka’s posthumous novel does not end, but goes on still for a good stretch further. Next comes a new defeat. For the first time a Castle secretary speaks kindly to K.—even his kindness, however, gives cause for certain doubts; but all the same it is the first time that a functionary of the Castle shows good will and actually declares himself ready to intervene in the affair—which is not really in his province, however (here lies the catch)—and so help K. But K. is too tired and sleepy to be able even to put this offer to the test. At the decisive moment his bodily powers fail him. There follow scenes in which K. strays farther and farther from his goal. All these episodes are only outlined in their preliminary and tentative stages. As they are unfinished I am reserving them for a supplementary volume (as I did with the unfinished chapters of The Trial).
Kafka never wrote his concluding chapter. But he told me about it once when I asked him how the novel was to end. The ostensible Land Surveyor was to find partial satisfaction at least. He was not to relax in his struggle, but was to die worn out by it. Round his deathbed the villagers were to assemble, and from the Castle itself the word was to come that though K.’s legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was to be permitted to live and work there.
With this echo of Goethe’s “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den dürfen wir erlösen
”1 (certainly a very remote echo, and ironically reduced to a minimum), this work, which may truly be called Franz Kafka’s Faust, was to end. Certainly K. is a Faust in deliberately modest, even needy trappings, and with the essential modification that he is driven on not by a longing for the final goals of humanity, but by a need for the most primitive requisites of life, the need to be rooted in a home and a calling, and to become a member of a community. At the first glance this difference seems very great, but becomes considerably less so when one recognises that for Kafka those primitive goals have religious significance, and are simply the right life, the right way (Tao).
When Kafka’s novel, The Trial, was published, I intentionally omitted to add in my note at the end any comment on the content of the book; an interpretation or anything of that nature. When later, in the reviews, I read the crassest misinterpretations, such as, for instance, that in The Trial Kafka was occupied in scourging the abuses of justice, I regretted my discretion, but would no doubt have been still more disappointed had I given some sort of interpretation, and in spite of it the unavoidable misconstructions of careless or less gifted readers had remained. The case is different this time. The Castle is obviously not so near its finished state as The Trial, although (just as in The Trial) internally determined all through, in spite of its lack of external completeness, by the complex of feeling which the author was resolved to traverse. This is one of the mysteries and part of the absolute uniqueness of Kafka’s art, that for the chosen reader of those great unfinished novels the conclusion loses in importance from the point at which the main assumptions are more or less completely given. Nevertheless, at the stage at which it was left, The Trial could more easily dispense with concluding chapters than the present book can. When a drawing is approaching its completion it no longer needs guiding lines. Then one uses guiding lines at one’s discretion, and any other data to hand, notes, etc., so as to carry on the drawing to its conjectured end. Of course, in no circumstances will one confuse or mix up the drawing itself with the scaffolding.
One of those guiding lines which I think can be dispensed with less easily in The Castle than in The Trial, leads us back to The Trial again. The resemblance between the two books is striking. It is not merely the likeness between the names of the heroes (Josef K. in The Trial and K. in The Castle), that points to this. (Here I may mention that The Castle seems to have been begun as a story in the first person, the earlier chapters being altered by the author, “K.” being inserted everywhere in place of “I,” and the later chapters written straight out in the third person.) The essential thing to be noted is that the hero in The Trial is persecuted by an invisible and mysterious authority and summoned to stand his trial, and that in The Castle he is prevented from doing exactly the same thing. “Josef K.” conceals himself and flees—“K.” advances to the attack. But in spite of the reversal of the action the underlying feeling is the same. For what is the meaning of this Castle with its strange documents, its impenetrable hierarchy of officials, its moods and trickeries, its demand (and its absolutely justified demand) for unconditional respect, unconditional obedience? Without excluding more specific interpretations, which may
