J. Basic. Appl. Sci. Res., 2(3)2243-2248, 2012 © 2012, TextRoad Publication
ISSN 2090-4304 Journal of Basic and Applied Scientific Research www.textroad.com
A Psychological Analysis on Franz Kafka’s The Castle Fatemeh Azizmohammadi Department of English Literature, Arak Branch, Islamic Azad University, Arak, Iran
ABSTRACT The Castle is an unfinished novel, which was written in 1922 by Kafka. It is a continuation of his earlier works. It does not tackle any new themes or expand to new areas of thought. It has no great incidents, so no real plot, no climax, no end, not even a hero in the normal sense, just a paradoxical figure who seems to start a quest in his imagination. In his imaginative world, there is only a seemingly omnipresent castle that dominates the village below. The story is based on a struggle which depicted observations, dialogues and a string of episodes in which K.’s ambition is thwarted by hidden powers. The struggle which blends into a single, symbolic action revolves around the castle as a place, a goal, a symbol, an authority and K.’s fate. Kafka’s The Castle is the dramatization of man’s self-discovery in the depth of dark, ambiguous and diabolic world. This world which has been pictured by Kafka is the world of the Castle itself. This paper attempts to make a psychological study on Kafka’s The Castle. Keywords: Kafka, The Castle, Psychology, Self, Hope, Life, Sin. INTRODUCTION The Castle has a story centering round a character called K. He is a land-surveyor. In the story, K calls himself a land-surveyor, perhaps, to find a way into the castle. But at a symbolic level, he is more of a life-surveyor than a land-surveyor. In this context Greenberg [1] says: One who comes to survey land in such a universal world is a life surveyor, a thinker who tries to grasp the whole of life in the survey of his consciousness. K has been hired to survey an estate or small principality ruled by a certain Count Westwest. Its principal features are an undistinguished village inhabited by shopkeepers and artisans and a nearby hill with a castle occupied by Government offices. K’s problem is to go to the Castle and find out what he is expected to do. Normally this should be a simple routine matter, but he meets with a maddening succession of obstacles. His struggles to reach his goal and to prove that he has been engaged as a surveyor make up the story. In the first edition the story ended with Barnabas securing for K an interview with an official of the Castle Erlanger. The novel was cut short by Kafka’s death. In the second edition Max Brod published another episode from Kafka’s manuscript in which K is interviewed by an official named Bϋrgel who assures him that the Castle far from rejecting K is actually eager to communicate with him. It is only necessary to try a different approach. This message of hope falls on deaf ears, however, for this time K has fallen asleep. According to Brod, the story was to end with K continuing his struggle until he dies of exhaustion. As he lies on his deathbed, word arrives from the Castle saying that although K has no valid claim to be in the village yet taking auxiliary circumstances into account he will be permitted to continue to live there. Thus the novel centers round K. who is an expatriate. It is also interesting to note that there is an air of permanent homelessness about K. He also seems to have accepted his fate as the rootless wanderer on a quest haunted by a compellingly sinister atmosphere. Much the same can be said about Kafka. Most of Kafka’s protagonists are in some way inextricably trapped in some fashion and the readers are also engulfed by the text as K’s problem becomes their own. Trace of Allegory in Kafka’s The Castle The Castle is an allegory for Kafka’s nightmare of the unconscious world. K, the protagonist of the novel, finds himself in a vicious circle. He starts his journey into the dark jungle of the Unconscious. The more he tries to get closer to the village and the villagers, the more suspicious they get about him. The more he tries to communicate with the castle, the more he is denied the access to it, and which in turn makes it urgent for him to prove his identity to the villagers. “Very simply”, replied the superintendent, “you haven’t up till now come into real contact with our authorities. All those contacts of yours have been illusory, but owing to your ignorance of the circumstances, you *Corresponding Author: Fatemeh Azizmohammadi, Department of English Literature, Arak Branch, Islamic Azad University, Arak, Iran. E-mail: F-azizmohammadi@iau-arak.ac.ir.
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