The Castle

Left alone with Olga, K. enjoys her calming presence and her “blue, not enticing, not domineering, but shyly tranquil, shyly steadfast eyes” (171). Olga tells K. that Amalia is the youngest daughter and yet the most responsible member of the family, taking on a lot and suffering in the process. They talk about Barnabas and his job as a messenger. Olga describes her family’s confusion over whether Barnabas is a higher servant of the Castle or not. She details the issue of Barnabas not receiving the suit he is due, to show his rank and position. She describes the obscure and incoherent workings of the Castle: “Is it even Castle work that Barnabas is doing, we then ask; he certainly does go into the offices, but are the offices actually the Castle?” (174). She also casts doubt on whether the official identified as Klamm is actually Klamm. This surprises K., who responds, “how can there be any doubt about Klamm’s appearance, his appearance is well-known, I’ve seen him myself” (175). Olga says this issue is her “gravest concern” (175).

Olga continues by describing Barnabas’s doubts over Klamm and his messenger post. Olga describes Klamm’s appearance as continuously changing, the only constant being his long black coat. K. starts to feel an allegiance with Olga as her feelings toward the Castle seem to match his own more closely than Frieda’s do. She recounts Barnabas’s description of the office procedures at the Castle, which are incomprehensible and absurd. The process of producing a letter to be sent, like the letter to K., is incoherent and shows that letters that are supposedly from Klamm are most likely not from him at all. Barnabas receives old letters from under a copyist’s table and then may deliver them to the recipient weeks later. Olga claims she tries to highlight the importance of Barnabas’s official position, which affords the family great respect, and yet her brother is lax in his duties.

Olga returns to her description of Klamm’s existence as possibly illusory, fueled by her brother’s accounts. K., however, explains that Barnabas is too young for his impressions to be trusted. K. retains hope that Klamm and the Castle are what he thinks they are: “if an authority is good, then why shouldn’t one respect it?” (183). K. trusts the letters that Barnabas delivers more than Barnabas’s words about the Castle. He says the letters have “a significance that, while merely private and scarcely transparent, is nevertheless quite considerable” (184). Olga goes on to explain that there is something K. does not know about her family, and if she is to tell him, he “will be drawn into [their] affairs, innocently, not much guiltier than Barnabas” (186). K. presses Olga to reveal the secret.

Olga starts explaining the secret by mentioning an official from the Castle called Sortini, who may be connected with the fire department. Three years previously, she and Amalia got dressed up to go to a festival of the Firemen’s Association, of which their father was an esteemed member. Amalia made a strong impression, with the Bridge Inn landlady’s approval, and her father was sure that she would find a fiancé that day. Their father was still very robust and healthy at that time. At the festival, Sortini noticed Amalia, and the next day Amalia received a letter from Sortini demanding in vulgar tones that she go to the Gentlemen’s Inn immediately. Amalia disregarded the order; her disobedience and her treatment of the messenger led to the family being punished severely. Olga compares Frieda’s relationship with Klamm to Amalia’s with Sortini, which K. finds insulting to Frieda. He vehemently defends his fiancée, saying, “all attacks against Frieda are at the same time attacks against my existence” (198). Olga says she does not wish to insult Frieda, but everyone in the village despises her family, so she would not blame Frieda for doing so too. K. is surprised that Amalia’s refusal to submit to Sortini caused the family to be shunned, but Olga insists it is so. She describes how her father was still happy and hopeful the day after the festival, as he was unaware of the letter and Amalia’s reaction to it.

The day after the festival, all Olga’s father’s customers came and removed their shoes that were waiting for repair, paid their debts, and cut off connection with him. Brunswick came and gave notice that he had to vacate the shop. This was followed by a visit from Seemann, chief of the fire company. The family expected him to put a stop to all the nonsense, but instead he praised their father highly before asking him to resign and return his diploma, which devastated him. K. interjects, asking, “And where in all this do you see the influence of the Castle?” (204). Olga replies that it was “all due to the influence of the Castle” (205) and that Amalia was blameless. She explains that the villagers’ reaction was due to fear of the Castle, which remained silent on the matter. They never heard any more about the letter, but the community eventually rejected the family completely: “Everything that we were and possessed met with the same contempt” (211). They now live in utter poverty, and the two parents are sick and demented. Amalia remains aloof and proud, but she has had to bear the most.

Olga continues to the story, telling K. how, in defiance of Amalia, the family petitioned the Castle for forgiveness. Her father was at one point admitted to the Castle, but “then he was dismissed with extreme speed and never admitted again” (213). The Castle took no responsibility whatsoever for the family’s situation and blamed “trade matters and the marketplace” (213) for the family’s impoverishment. Her father, still strong at that point, fought for the Castle’s forgiveness and the restoration of Amalia’s honor. But the Castle would not even acknowledge that he was guilty and had something to be forgiven for. The family used up their remaining money to bribe officials, to no avail. Losing all traces of his previous rationality, her father resorted to begging in the hope of receiving the mercy of a kind official.

K. asks whether it is a mistake to think there are some among them with “good, compassionate hearts” (217). Olga affirms that there are none, and even if there were, each official is concerned with only his own small area of responsibility and so would not have the power or ability to pardon such a wrongdoing. Olga’s father resorted to waiting beside the road where many official carriages would pass every day on their way to the Castle. He did this through rain and snow until his health was ruined, like that of his wife who accompanied them. They took to their beds, where Amalia tended them until her father was well enough to get up. Since then, she leaves the care to Olga and Barnabas.

Olga continues her story. Their father’s desolation led Olga and Barnabas to try to find the messenger who took the ripped-up letter back to Sortini. Their hope was that this individual could bestow personal forgiveness on them. Olga describes the challenges in this quest, since the Castle’s servants all look the same. She ended up offering sexual services nightly to the servants who came down from the Castle to the Gentlemen’s Inn with their masters, and who would turn into “a wild, unruly horde” (224) when in the village. Olga has yet to find Sortini’s servant. She has learned through her contacts that there is the possibility of becoming unofficially employed in the Castle as a “secret semi-probationer” (223). Through these connections and ephemeral hopes, Barnabas managed to find a place as a messenger. He has held the position for two years, and the first task he was ever given was to deliver the letters to and from K. These letters represent “the first, if still rather doubtful, signs of favor that our family has received in three years” (230). Olga stresses the great importance of the family’s relationship with K. now that their fate is dependent upon him.

One of K.’s assistants, Jeremias, comes to the house to look for him. Amalia deters him to avoid alerting Frieda to K.’s visit to their house. Olga shows K. how to sneak out without being seen, and K. shows Olga his thanks. Once outside, Jeremias tells K. that he and his brother have filed a complaint against him at the Castle, for his inability to take a joke. They were employed by Galater, Klamm’s substitute at the time, as assistants to the surveyor with the purpose of cheering K. up, as he was perceived to take everything very seriously: “He has come to the village and right away thinks that this is some great event, but in reality it’s nothing at all. You should teach him that” (234). Both assistants have resigned from their difficult and thankless posts. Jeremias only came to look for K. to reassure Frieda, who feels betrayed by K.’s visit to the Barnabas girls and has returned to work in the taproom at the inn. Jeremias criticizes K. for not appreciating the sacrifices Frieda made for him. She had been having second thoughts about her move, and Jeremias is now able to confirm to her that K. was indeed at the Barnabas house and the girls “were at [his] beck and call” (235). Jeremias has outsmarted K.