“It was simply out of calculation of the vilest kind that K. made up to Frieda, and that he stuck to her so long as he still had some hope that his plans would succeed. He believed, in fact, that in her he had won a sweetheart of the Herr Director, and so possessed a hostage which could only be redeemed at the highest figure. His one endeavour now is to treat with the Herr Director about his price. Seeing that Frieda matters nothing to him, the price everything, he is ready for any concession so far as Frieda is concerned, but as regards the price he is adamant. For the time being harmless, apart from the loathsome detail of his engagement and this proposition of his, when he recognises how completely he has deceived himself and betrayed himself he may become really vicious, to the limits of his small powers, of course.

“That was the end of the page. There was also on the margin a childishly scrawled drawing of a man holding a girl in his arms; the girl’s face was hidden in the man’s breast, but he, being much taller, was looking over her shoulder at a paper in his hand on which he was gleefully entering some figures.”

The connection between the “Castle”⁠—that is Divine Guidance⁠—and the women, this connection half-discovered and half-suspected by K. , may appear obscure, and even inexplicable, in the Sortini episode where the official (Heaven) requires the girl to do something obviously immoral and obscene; and here a reference to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling may be of value⁠—a work which Kafka loved much, read often, and profoundly commented on in many letters. The Sortini episode is literally a parallel to Kierkegaard’s book, which starts from the fact that God required of Abraham what was really a crime, the sacrifice of his child; and which uses this paradox to establish triumphantly the conclusion that the categories of morality and religion are by no means identical. The incommensurability of earthly and religious aims; this takes one right into the heart of Kafka’s novel. It must be noted, however, that Kierkegaard, the Christian, starting from this conflict of