If there is a connection between The Castle and the life lived by its author it must be located in two biographical facts: Because of his worsening tuberculosis Kafka was forced to reside increasingly in the countryside away from the city of Prague, and since this is his last novel, his last large prose piece of any kind, he may have pursued in the fiction his thoughts on the end of life. That these are social concerns is only a secondary result of a broad interpretation of the novel.

As with The Trial, the reader certainly can see in the central image, the castle itself, intimations of such subjects as: the impenetrability of political power, Hapsburg perhaps; some ultimate goal, whether social or religious or personal is impossible to say; or even an emotional quest ever eluding, ever closed. To have lived in Prague as a...