The Castle (Das Schloss) is an unfinished (and published two years after his death against his posthumous wishes) novel by Franz Kafka.
A Land Surveyor known only as K. is summoned to a faraway, nameless village where his services are supposedly required. Upon arriving, he discovers that in the interim between his invitation and his coming, the village has since decided against the need for a Land Surveyor and in fact, the only reason K. received a letter at all was due to a clerical miscommunication. K. is subsequently incensed at having travelled such a great distance for nothing and seeks satisfaction by attempting to confront the government who presides over the community from an old, repurposed castle.
It soon becomes apparent to everyone (except K.) that he would've been better off if he had just walked away from the start.
A brisk and robust fable of acceptance, alienation, and anxiety, The Castle has inspired several film adaptations (one of them Mongolian), two radio dramas, an off-broadway stage production, and Suda51's cancelled horror game Kurayami which in turn became the basis for his own Shadows of the Damned and Kurayami Dance. It also served as inspiration for the 2010 Point-and-Click Adventure Game A Stitch in Time
by Matthias Kempke, who subsequently worked on The Night of the Rabbit and Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice.
"The Castle" provides examples of:
- Anti-Hero: K.'s circumstances are pitiable, his determination admirable, but the man himself can be rather petty and stubborn.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: A number of characters point out that there's nothing keeping K. in the village, and some of them outright tell him that he's not welcome in their community. Nonetheless, K. insists on staying.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Hans and Gardena of the Bridge Inn are primarily referred to as the landlord and landlady respectively, even by people who personally know them. However, they fare better than their counterparts at the Herrenhof Inn, who aren't named at all.
- Genre Savvy: A handful of the villagers understand how inefficient the Castle's bureaucratic system is but have learned to live with it as it mostly works. These same citizens advise K. against trying to gain entry into the Castle due to how it barely opens up for them, if that, and how even if he does manage to infiltrate the building, it likely wouldn't be worth it.
- Kafka Komedy: Bleak, laborious, and very witty.
- Large Ham: Everyone from government officials to lowly peasantry are apt to go on longwinded rants about their circumstances and plights for several paragraphs if not pages.
- No Ending
- No Name Given: The parents of Barnabas, Olga, and Amalia. Ditto for the mayor/superintendent, the owners of the Herrenhof Inn, and the first teacher that K. meets.
- Those Two Guys: Arthur and Jeremiah, K.'s "old" assistants who share no real history with him and are as useless as they are indistinguishable from one another.
- "In all likelihood a quite useless journey, a lost day, a completely vain hope. What's the good of it all?"
