likeness between the names of the heroes (Josef K. in The Trial and K. in The Castle ), that points to this. (Here I may mention that The Castle seems to have been begun as a story in the first person, the earlier chapters being altered by the author, “ K. ” being inserted everywhere in place of “I,” and the later chapters written straight out in the third person.) The essential thing to be noted is that the hero in The Trial is persecuted by an invisible and mysterious authority and summoned to stand his trial, and that in The Castle he is prevented from doing exactly the same thing. “Josef K. ” conceals himself and flees—“ K. ” advances to the attack. But in spite of the reversal of the action the underlying feeling is the same. For what is the meaning of this Castle with its strange documents, its impenetrable hierarchy of officials, its moods and trickeries, its demand (and its absolutely justified demand) for unconditional respect, unconditional obedience? Without excluding more specific interpretations, which may be completely valid, but which are subsumed within this very comprehensive one as the inner compartments of a Chinese puzzle are enclosed within the outer—this “Castle” to which K. never gains admission, to which for some incomprehensible reason he can never even get near, is much the same thing as what the theologians call “grace,” the divine guidance of human destiny (the village), the effectual cause of all chances, mysterious dispensations, favours and punishments, the unmerited and the unattainable, the “ Non liquet ” written over the life of everybody. In The Trial and The Castle , then, are represented the two manifested forms of the Godhead (in the sense of The Cabbala), justice and grace.
K. sought a connection with the grace of the Godhead when he sought to root himself in the village at the foot of the Castle; he fought for an occupation, a post in a certain sphere of life; by his choice of a calling and by marriage he wanted to gain inner stability, wanted as a “stranger”—that is from an isolated position and as one different from everybody else—to wrest for himself the thing which fell into the ordinary man’s lap as if of itself, without his striving for it particularly or thinking about