The purpose of this research is to examine philosophical, spiritual, psychological, and political questions of indeterminacy and uncertainty in Kafka's novel The Castle. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas emerging in the work and then to discuss the means by which Kafka uses the central character K, the outsider, to develop a narrative in which the principal line of action illustrates the dominant power of contingency and process in human experience.
To refer to a pattern of ideas in The Castle is to make an assertion about a project of literary irony that nevertheless--or for that very reason--entails a project of literary morality as well. The Castle does far more than suggest that things may not be what they seem and that the difference between appearance and reality has a certain moral content. The very environment of the story defies expectations about immediate experience of the universe.
Lundwall cites the "bizarre universes" that Kafka creates (229). K's bizarre universe unfolds because K cannot report for work to the castle that has hired him as a land surveyor and because of the persistently mixed messages he receives on that account. The action of the book is defined by K's attempt to make connection with the castle, but every method and stratagem he employs to do so fail. Basically, K assumes the status of illegal alien in the village near the castle and is repeatedly reminded that this status puts him in violation of the law. K is "a stranger, a man who isn't wanted and is in everybody's way, a man who's always causing trouble . . . whose intentions are obscure" (Kafka 63-4). In this capacity, he is, according to the formulation by Deleuze and Guattari (19-22), "deterritorialized," i.e., broken off from foundations that make experience (or the cosmos) thinkable. K settles into a pattern of being treated with "apparent favor" by such public officials as the mayor of the village (75-6) ...