The Castle

“It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay under deep snow. There was no sign of the Castle hill, fog and darkness surrounded it, not even the faintest gleam of light suggested the Castle.”

The protagonist K. arrives at the village at the very beginning of the book. The mysterious and forbidding image of the Castle in the dark foreshadows the ominous and unreachable power that its authority holds and that forms the central theme of the book.

“‘I want to be free at all times.’

‘You don’t know the Castle,’ the landlord said softly.”

K. ask the Bridge Inn landlord about what he can expect in terms of pay from the Castle. He states his wish not to live up at the Castle and expresses his desire for independence. The landlord’s reply is a warning, a foreshadowing of the events to come whereby K. will lose all sense of freedom and find his life inseparable from the workings of the Castle and its authorities.

“The tower up here—it was the only one in sight—the tower of a residence, as now became evident, possibly of the main Castle, was a monotonous round building, in part mercifully hidden by ivy, with little windows that glinted in the sun—there was something crazy about this—and ending in a kind of terrace, whose battlements, uncertain, irregular, brittle, as if drawn by the anxious or careless hand of a child, zigzagged into the blue sky.”

K. explores the village the morning after his arrival and sees the Castle in daylight. The description includes words like “crazy,” “anxious,” “uncertain,” and “brittle.” This choice of adjectives to describe a solid old building is unusual and foreshadows the incomprehensible nature of the Castle’s workings and the incongruous events that will befall K.