Rick-Phil’s Reviews > The Castle > Status Update

A chapter of pitying events

“Besides, it isn’t laid down that I should go at once with every message; if it were laid down, of course I would go at once with every message; but it isn’t laid down, and I if I never went at all, nothing could be said to me. When I take a message it’s of my own free will. (ch. 10, p. 157)

Is he wrong?

“Besides, it isn’t laid down that I should go at once with every message; if it were laid down, of course I would go at once with every message; but it isn’t laid down, and I if I never went at all, nothing could be said to me. When I take a message it’s of my own free will. (ch. 10, p. 157)

Further, this passage highlights this strange tension between K & the village: K sees folk as people while still according the economic and political trajectory to them as officials. The village seems to see folk through the lens of their culture & as people: they are veiled yet revealed to one another: sometimes where the political and economic would seem undeniable--instead seemingly missing. A curious duplexity

During the editing of chapter 6, Kafka removed an intriguing passage. Though the editing is a good choice on his part, the passage interrupting the course of K.'s intent and the landlady's development in helping him rather than abusing him(though such help may have proven an abuse),an intriguing passage no less. While K imagines Klemm as a person (another K. in some sense), those who love him love him as the official

Chapter 5 is undoubtedly the beset explanation of bureaucracy, by a bureaucrat no less, that I have encountered so far.