Everything is detached in this book, alienated. Even the third person narration gives a sense of alienation. K. is a strange person in a strange land, he cannot quite fit into any scene of the story. And yet the events are all told as from K.’s perspective, which gives a warped view of the world. It’s like an Escher drawing, or something.
The flow between dialogue and narration is rather brilliant and accentuates the alienation. I don’t always feel like I’m watching a play when I read The Castle, rather, sometimes it’s as if I’m watching a scene play out in the distance and someone is standing beside me narrating what is happening way over there. It’s a very strange feeling that I’ve never gotten from a book before.
It took me 200 pages, but I realized the word that perfectly describes this book: insufferable. (No doubt some of the insufferability is due to the translation from German, but that’s beside the point.) Every character is insufferable, concerned only with the most minute trivialities of the bureaucratic maze that is the Castle. What amazes me is how Kafka is able to convey this feeling of insufferability so well that I can’t stop reading. It’s like watching a slow motion car crash: extremely difficult to watch and yet you can’t bring yourself to look away. Kafka was writing in I believe 1920-1930, at the height of the totalitarian bureaucracy of the Nazi government, and I can’t help but draw parallels.
As for the characters, it is as if each character’s internal struggle is this: they are trying to claw their way out of the uncanny valley, but they just can’t quite figure out what it takes to get over that last ledge. They kind of remind me of Westworld characters. They are definitely functioning individuals, but they aren’t quite all there. They don’t reason for themselves, or take any active role in their lives: instead they are all purely reactive to the events and happenings of the Castle. They all seem to have an incredible ability to talk at great length about nothing at all, perhaps this is what makes them bureaucrats.
The ethical situation with Amalia’s secret is, by my estimation, a fantastic depiction of Nietzsche’s slave morality. Amalia is the only respectable character in the whole story, besides. Her father says, “I’ll restore Amalia’s honor, it won’t take long now,” but says it sheepishly, in a low voice. He has no idea what honor is, or why it is important. Only that the society and the Castle say that some thing called honor is important, and the man of the house should uphold it, and in attempting to do so his life is drained from him and he is left old and withered. This is a propping-up of an arbitrary morality by the Castle: institutionalized morality. Its absurd, of course. But this is how society works, and this is what Nietzsche taught us. Meanwhile, Amalia is vibrant, bearing all responsibility for the household. She already established her honor as one that doesn’t conform to the very strange moral norms of the Castle. In denying Sortini, against the wishes of her family but congruent with her own conception of honor and morality, she made the single active movement in the entire plot. She is Nietzsche’s ubermensch.
Most striking is the way the Castle constructs a world that encourages slave morality in the Village. It is evident in every character, especially K., who starts the book energized and assertive with getting to his work, but by the end he is pulled in every direction by the insanity of the different Villagers and Castle workers. Each character, by the way, that has a long monologue contradicts themself multiple times: this adds to their insufferability.
At any moment in the book, K. could have just walked away as easily as he had walked into the Village. But he never cuts any interaction short, never even thinks about leaving. He gets caught up in the social strata of the Castle, believes he needs to attain social status, and throughout the story increasingly suffers because of it. I guess he is the bearer of the insufferability of the rest of the characters.
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