a longing for the final goals of humanity, but by a need for the most primitive requisites of life, the need to be rooted in a home and a calling, and to become a member of a community. At the first glance this difference seems very great, but becomes considerably less so when one recognises that for Kafka those primitive goals have religious significance, and are simply the right life, the right way (Tao).
When Kafka’s novel, The Trial , was published, I intentionally omitted to add in my note at the end any comment on the content of the book; an interpretation or anything of that nature. When later, in the reviews, I read the crassest misinterpretations, such as, for instance, that in The Trial Kafka was occupied in scourging the abuses of justice, I regretted my discretion, but would no doubt have been still more disappointed had I given some sort of interpretation, and in spite of it the unavoidable misconstructions of careless or less gifted readers had remained. The case is different this time. The Castle is obviously not so near its finished state as The Trial , although (just as in The Trial ) internally determined all through, in spite of its lack of external completeness, by the complex of feeling which the author was resolved to traverse. This is one of the mysteries and part of the absolute uniqueness of Kafka’s art, that for the chosen reader of those great unfinished novels the conclusion loses in importance from the point at which the main assumptions are more or less completely given. Nevertheless, at the stage at which it was left, The Trial could more easily dispense with concluding chapters than the present book can. When a drawing is approaching its completion it no longer needs guiding lines. Then one uses guiding lines at one’s discretion, and any other data to hand, notes, etc. , so as to carry on the drawing to its conjectured end. Of course, in no circumstances will one confuse or mix up the drawing itself with the scaffolding.
One of those guiding lines which I think can be dispensed with less easily in The Castle than in The Trial , leads us back to The Trial again. The resemblance between the two books is striking. It is not merely the