This review covers only The Castle, one of the works in this anthology.

Franz Kafka lived in Germany in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries He is most well-known for his work The Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist grotesquely wakes up one day as a giant cockroach. The work of this review (The Castle) was started and left unfinished in 1922, two years before Kafka’s death in 1924. It was only published posthumously in 1926 – against Kafka’s expressed wishes in his will.

It tells the story of the main character, known only tersely as K., who arrives in a village in Germany and claims to be a “land surveyor.” However, he cannot get approval to work in this role unless certified by the village’s central authority, named Klamm, dwelling in a Castle. The villagers keep pushing him towards the Castle, but despite the necessity of authorization, he is unable to get an audience. (Anyone who has dealt with governmental or corporate bureaucracies can certainly relate.) His assistants get jobs there, his girlfriend gets an audience there after cheating on K., but K. can never attain his goal. The story ends abruptly, without a climax or a denoument, and the reader is left to imagine the rest of the tale.

Scholars have long pondered the symbolism that Kafka intended. Of course, we will never know for sure. Could it be humanity’s never-ending yet unattained attempt at salvation and at finding God/heaven on earth? Could it just be the futility and meaninglessness of life? Could it be about the facelessness of modern governmental bureaucracies? Though not a professional literary scholar, I suggest that we need to see this work in the scope of the European intellectual landscape after World War I. This landscape held a bevy of alienated individuals who saw through human attempts of self-betterment, only to destroy each other horrifically on battlefields. They were disillusioned with everything – God, progress, labor, idealism, Marxism, democracy, indeed with all of life.

In this sense, we can view Kafka in The Castle as a proto-existentialist. After Kafka, Sartre and Camus wrote elegantly about the absurdity of life. Some might find books like this hopeless. I certainly had my frustrations while reading it of its pointlessness. Still, such existentialist dilemmas certainly fit with Kafka’s disposition and historical moment. If he can write a classic about suddenly turning into a cockroach, why not write a story without an ending? ( )