One of the broadest techniques used in The Castle is that of satire, directed both at the governmental bureaucracy and at the petit bourgeois. Both subjects had been attacked by Kafka before but here the strokes seem broader, less subtle, more savage. The bureaucracy which was obstructionist in The Trial becomes malevolent; the punishment meted out by bourgeois fathers against wayward offspring appears here more savage and heartless. Kafka's irony is also broadened, opening the prose more easily to interpretation, yet without promoting easy answers.

Kafka's prose, always so lucid and clear, is never more so than in The Castle. It is one of the great achievements of his style that he manages to promote such ambiguity of interpretation with such clarity of detail. Even the fragmentary nature of the manuscript, the incompleteness of the tale, does not prove an obstacle to the work's ability to convey its...