Kafka's use of dream allegory versus realism in The Castle

¶ … feelings, events and behaviors in the Castle are so common in people's everyday lives (alienation, betrayal, the indifference of bureaucracy to human value), why does Kafka choose the medium of the dream/allegory in which to express them, rather than a straight Realist approach of one man facing the terror of the world?

Desolate, stressful, hopeless: this is the world that Franz Kafka inhabited in the first quarter of the 20th century in which he died. Kafka's posthumous novel Das Schloss (The Castle) is an allegory themed upon indifference and social alienation, cloaked in inevatability but striving to break through. These themes are common in Kafka's stories. Everybody is strangers to one another, and the only thang that brings them together is weird obligation. The world of Kafka is one that is nice to visit, but not to live in. What makes some of Kafka's stories so powerful is their symbolic storytelling, rather than realist representation. This enables the story to remain at a safe distance from life, enabling Kafka to make a meta-ethical statement untethered by the banality of his own world. In The Castle, Kafka explores the ethical role of the government official through his mysically eponymous protagonist, K.

The villagers are highly deferential to K., who becomes known as a government official in the first scene of the novel. As soon as word reaches the dreary inn that the stranger is indeed on an assignment from the Count, their attitude turns from suspicion to respect. What is odd about the ordeal is that the officer is of a very low rank -- the son of a substeward -- but still commands the hushed attention of all the people at the inn. This is the first occasion that the novel produces an example of social status (1-5), which will be tested and prodded as K. proceeds towards the Castle.

K.'s journey is aimless from the morning he wakes up in the village. "[The] main street in the village, did not lead to the Castle hill, it only went close by, then veered off as if on purpose, and though it didn't lead any farther from the Castle, it didn't get any closer either" (10). As a land surveyor, someone appointed to make maps or diagrams for the use of the government, but all he sees is a mess of confusion. As soon as his presence is known to be based on a miscommunication, his role is effortlessly changed to school janitor. The myth of social status melts into thin air. For Kafka, character is as disposable as the reason that props it up, and in this allegorical world, office, not reason, is what holds the plot together.