almost nothing. Kafka does agree with Bunyan in two things: that the goal and the road indubitably exist, and that the necessity to find them is urgent. His hero’s journey, however, is a much more difficult business; for people’s reports, ancient legends, one’s own intuitions, even the road signs, may all be equally untrustworthy. If anyone wanted to estimate how immensely more difficult it is for a religious genius to see his way in an age of scepticism than in an age of faith, a comparison of The Pilgrim’s Progress with The Castle might give him a fair measure of it. Yet hardly a fair measure, perhaps. For Bunyan’s mind was primitive compared with the best minds of his age, and Kafka’s is more subtly sceptical than the most sceptical of our own. Its scepticism, however, is grounded on a final faith, and this is what must make his novels appear paradoxical, perhaps even incomprehensible, to some contemporary readers. His scepticism is not an attitude or a habit; it is a weapon for testing his faith and his doubt alike, and for discarding from them what is inessential.

Accordingly in the present book and The Trial the postulates he begins with are the barest possible; they are roughly those: that there is a right way of life, and that the discovery of it depends on one’s attitude to powers which are almost unknown. What he sets out to do is to find out something about those powers, and the astonishing thing is that he appears to succeed. While following the adventures of his heroes we seem to be discovering⁠—almost without being fully aware of it⁠—various things about those entities which we had never divined before, and could never perhaps have divined by ourselves. We are led in through circle after circle of a newly found spiritual domain, where everything is strange and yet real, and where we recognise objects without being able to give them a name. The virtue of a good allegory is that it expresses in its own created forms something more exact than any interpretation of it could. The Pilgrim’s Progress did this in its very circumscribed way; it is more exact in detail than any theoretical exposition of it could be; but indeed its interpretation, a banally simplified theological system, existed