A study guide for Franz Kafka's "The Castle"

By Gale and Cengage

A study guide for Franz Kafka's "The Castle", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535823685

Book preview

10

The Castle

Franz Kafka

1930

Introduction

If Franz Kafka, the author of The Castle (1930), had gotten his expressed wish, the unfinished novel would never have been read by anyone beyond his close friends. As tuberculosis brought him to a slow and painful death at the age of forty, Kafka famously requested that his close friend Max Brod destroy all of his unpublished writings, which included three novels that Kafka had never completed. Brod refused to honor the request, seeing in these writings the best of his friend's work. Instead, Brod actively sought publication for the works, starting with the novels. In 1926, The Castle was published in its original German, and an English translation was published in 1930. These early versions of the novel were somewhat different from what Kafka had left in his handwritten drafts. Since the novel was unfinished—literally ending in the middle of a sentence—Brod chose to omit some of the final chapters and end the book at a place that he thought made the most sense; Brod also cleaned up Kafka's text, which contained very little punctuation.

The novel concerns a man known only by the initial K.—though Kafka used his own name in his original drafts, and later changed it—who appears in a village that is under the rule of a Castle. K. claims to be a surveyor hired by the Castle authorities to work in the village, though the appointment appears to be no more than a glitch in the unwieldy Castle bureaucracy that governs the village. K. forms relationships with many villagers as he attempts to access the Castle and straighten out the problem, but his efforts fail to provide the satisfaction he seeks.

Kafka's published works (a few stories and novellas) were mostly ignored in his lifetime. The Castle was also largely ignored until the late 1940s. In the 1960s, scholars at Oxford University, who had acquired Kafka's original manuscript and other papers, led an effort to restore The Castle to its original form. This restored version was published in German in 1982. In 1998, translator Mark Harman created a new English translation of the novel based on this restored text, with the intent of preserving as much of Kafka's original writing style as possible.

Author Biography

Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, the capital city of the region of Bohemia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), where his father owned a dry-goods store. His German-speaking family was Jewish, and Kafka was the oldest of six children. His parents were successful in their business and therefore financially comfortable, but Kafka had a difficult childhood and grew up to fear his father. In addition, anti-Jewish sentiment was flaring up in Prague at the time, which caused the family to downplay their religious heritage. Kafka finished his secondary schooling in 1901 and attended German University in Prague; although his initial plan was to study chemistry, he quickly switched to law. However, his true interest seemed to be in German literature and art, which he studied whenever possible. While at the university he met Max Brod, who would remain a close friend until the author's death. Kafka graduated with a law degree in 1906, and worked as a clerk in his uncle's