, only to heaer as well that, although he has been recruited as land surveyor, "we have no need of a land-surveyor. . . . The frontiers of our little state are . . . all officially recorded" (76-7).
Initially, K's intentions are quite specific, but his admitted ignorance of local conditions (73-5) never transforms itself into understanding of those conditions. Instead, despite the increase in the amount of knowledge he has about the castle and despite the mounting evidence that the castle is not a place or an idea from which one can expect to receive satisfaction, K persists in his mission to obtain official recognition and get his status settled. The deterritorialization of K increases through the course of the story, so that foundation-lessness becomes his foundation to such an extreme "that nothing remains but intensities" (Deleuze and Guattari 19). Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that nothing remains except the exhaustion of the effort. Very much as a result of his efforts, K's status remains unsettled. The castle has inexhaustible means of preventing K from being satisfied, and these means quite literally exhaust K, who by the end of the story wants nothing so much as to go to sleep. When at last the castle bureaucrat Erlanger is waiting to meet K, K is distracted by the need to mollify his mistress Frieda and fails to keep the appointment. Erlanger, meanwhile, has himself fallen asleep and really would rather not be awakened.
Sokel refers to Kafkaesque fantasy as "narrated events in which the reader finds startling and puzzling deviations from his normal expectations, unexplained violations of what he would consider possible in the empirical world" (Sokel 149). Just as in any given episode of the popular television series The Twilight Zone, "events defying the laws of nature happen, or seem to happen, without, and even contrary to, any discernible will" (Sokel 149). To be sure, little in The Castle makes sense, even--o...