The Castle

The Castle (Das Schloss) is a novel by Franz Kafka, written in 1922 and published posthumously in 1926 by his friend Max Brod, against Kafka’s wishes that the manuscript be destroyed. The story follows a land surveyor known only as K., who arrives in a village governed by a mysterious castle bureaucracy. Despite his persistent efforts to gain access to the castle and have his appointment confirmed, K. is met with an impenetrable web of evasions, contradictions, and absurd regulations that keep him perpetually on the outside.

Through K.’s futile struggle against an inscrutable authority, Kafka crafts a devastating allegory of alienation, powerlessness, and the human desire for belonging. The novel’s labyrinthine bureaucracy—where officials are simultaneously omnipresent and unreachable—has become one of the defining images of modern literature, giving rise to the very term “Kafkaesque.” The Castle remains unfinished; Kafka broke off mid-sentence in Chapter 25, though Brod reported that Kafka had outlined an ending in which K. would receive permission to stay in the village only on his deathbed.

This edition uses the celebrated translation by Willa and Edwin Muir, who introduced Kafka’s major works to the English-speaking world.