'Kafka described with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the future absolutism of the state apparat, the paralyzed, 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
Both Joseph K in The Trial and K in The Castle are victims of anonymous governing forces being their control. Both are atomized, stranger 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 mấy be read as powerful allegories of totalitarian government in whatever guise it appears today.
In America Karl Rossman is 'packed off to America by his parents' to experience Oedipal abd 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 adventure is peculiar color'.
