At this point, which indicates an important, probably a decisive defeat for the hero, Franz Kafka’s posthumous novel does not end, but goes on still for a good stretch further. Next comes a new defeat. For the first time a Castle secretary speaks kindly to K. —even his kindness, however, gives cause for certain doubts; but all the same it is the first time that a functionary of the Castle shows good will and actually declares himself ready to intervene in the affair—which is not really in his province, however (here lies the catch)—and so help K. But K. is too tired and sleepy to be able even to put this offer to the test. At the decisive moment his bodily powers fail him. There follow scenes in which K. strays farther and farther from his goal. All these episodes are only outlined in their preliminary and tentative stages. As they are unfinished I am reserving them for a supplementary volume (as I did with the unfinished chapters of The Trial ).
Kafka never wrote his concluding chapter. But he told me about it once when I asked him how the novel was to end. The ostensible Land Surveyor was to find partial satisfaction at least. He was not to relax in his struggle, but was to die worn out by it. Round his deathbed the villagers were to assemble, and from the Castle itself the word was to come that though K. ’s legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was to be permitted to live and work there.
With this echo of Goethe’s “ Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den dürfen wir erlösen ” (certainly a very remote echo, and ironically reduced to a minimum), this work, which may truly be called Franz Kafka’s Faust , was to end. Certainly K. is a Faust in deliberately modest, even needy trappings, and with the essential modification that he is driven on not by