Kafka: The complete novels

Both Joseph K in The Trial and K in The Castle are victims of anonymous governing forces beyond their control. Both are atomised, estranged and rootless citizens deceived by authoritarian power. Whereas Joseph K is relentlessly hunted down for a crime that remains nameless, K ceaselessly attempts to enter the castle and so belong somewhere. Together these novels may be read as powerful allegories of totalitarian government in whatever guise it appears today.

In America Karl Rossmann is "packed off to America by his parents" to experience Oedipal and cultural isolation. Here, ordinary immigrants are also strange, and "America" is never quite as real as it seems. Kafka, a Czech Jew writing in German, never actually visited America, so, as Max Brod commented, "The innocence of his fantasy gives this book of adventures its peculiar colour."

"Kafka described with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the future absolutism of the state Apparat, the paralysed, inadequately motivated, floundering lives of the many individual people; everything appeared as in a nightmare and with the confusion and inadequacy of nightmare."
—Bertolt Brecht