The Castle (novel) - Allusions To The Castle in Other Works

Allusions To The Castle in Other Works

A story similar to that of The Castle is told in the British television series The Prisoner. In the late 1970s, an unlicensed computer game spin-off of The Prisoner took things one step further by incorporating elements of The Castle into the gameplay.

The Castle is also referred to in Lawrence Thornton's Imagining Argentina. A professor is arrested under suspicion of subversive activities. He tells the authorities he has been meeting Dostoyevsky, Koestler and Camus at a place called "the Castle". The main character's cat is also named Kafka.

Although not expressly stated as such, the Steven Soderbergh film Kafka from 1991, starring Jeremy Irons, incorporates the basic thematic elements of The Castle as well as allusions to Kafka's own life as a writer and his collected works. The title character, "Kafka", an insurance company clerk by day and a writer by night, lives and works in the shadow of the mysterious Castle, which rules over the life and death of the local citizenry through a seemingly incomprehensibly complex conspiracy of bureaucracy and cover-ups.

Iain Banks's novel Walking on Glass has characters who find themselves in a situation similar to K.'s: trapped in a castle, subject to arbitrary and bizarre rules which they must obey in order to find a way of leaving, and surrounded by "servants" who comply entirely with the rules by which the castle is run. The allusion is made specific in one of the final chapters, where reading The Castle (along with The Trial and Titus Groan) is hinted at as a key to the characters' escape from their own castle.

K., the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K, attempts to live simply outside the governing system of war torn South Africa.

African-American author Richard Wright references The Castle in his autobiography Black Boy.

Gene Wolfe's novel There Are Doors contains numerous references to The Castle throughout, including a high-placed official known as Klamm, several characters referred to as "Herr K.," and an actual copy of Das Schloss found nailed to a table within a dream.

Argentinian writer Ernesto Sabato is said to be influenced by Kafka's existentialism. The main character in his novelle, "The Tunnel", is named Castel, presumably after Kafka's story title.

In Sion Sono's film Guilty of Romance, The Castle is a leitmotif that keeps recurring all along the story, since the initial crime scene, when the investigators find "castle" written in human blood on the wall. Later on Mitsuko, the associate professor, will persuade Izumo to join her in a psychological journey, whose ultimate scope is to find a metaphorical (and unreachable) place called "The Castle".