the Castle. How help always turns up for him where it is least expected, and, on the other hand, how all his best-laid plans come to a miserable end—in cognac drinking, for instance—how the smallest temptation leads him into ruin (“ The Country Doctor .” “Once answer a false ring at your night-bell, and you can never repair the mischief”), and how in his bewilderment he lends an attentive ear to the world, which gives either no answer at all or the most ambiguous answers, to his eternal question concerning good and evil, yet how in the depths of his soul persists the inexpugnable hope that he will find the one right way which is made for him as he for it (“ Before the Law ”): all this hotch-potch of values and intuitions, of all the limitations, vaguenesses, quixotisms, difficulties, and even sheer impossibilities of human existence, and with it all, faintly glimmering through the confusion, the dawning belief in a higher order of things: all this seems to me to have been completely expressed in Kafka’s novel The Castle , expressed both with intellectual and with adequate emotional force, two elements which are inextricably blended in the book. The thoroughness with which the detail is worked out—perhaps here and there a matter for surprise at first—is indispensable for the completeness of the expression; and this will be misunderstood only by those who have never tried to come to a conclusion about some given fact in life (Napoleon, for example) and to fit it into a conception of “the right way” (whether right for one man or for all men). What Olga says about Barnabas’s letters is true of all the things in life that one examines seriously: “The reflections they give rise to are endless.” Or as is said in a deleted part of the story: “If you have the strength to look at things steadily, without, as it were, blinking your eyes, you can see much; but if you relax only once and shut your eyes, everything fades immediately into obscurity.”
As one who possessed both the strength and the capacity to keep his eyes open with unusual energy, animated by the deepest love (a love often full of bitterness and yet how tender!) Kafka, to use his own sober language, “saw much,” much that was never previously divined.