مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري

Abstract :

The propositions of the Enlightenment philosophy, which valued the individual and his/her freedom, began to lose effect in the middle of the 19th century, with the increasing dominance of the ‘social’ and ‘class’ brought about by the growing industrialization. This dominance, which was the result of the modern capitalist society and the beurocratic state power it gave rise to, drove the intellectuals and thinkers of the time to question the individual freedom ideals of the Enlightenment and the early stages of modernity. In the intellectual sphere this questioning gained speed with Marx but became most apparent in the propositions of the Frankfurt School, which showed a lean on Weber’s idea of beurocratic structures of the modern state. Franz Kafka’s The Castle contributes to this questioning from a literary perspective. The Castle is also important because it was written in Germany where the mechanisms of the beurocratic dominance structures were most overt. The novel strikingly represents how these mechanisms of dominance affect the individuals and the relationships between them. This study handles the individual ideal of the Enlightenment and the criticisms directed to this ideal in the modern times, and it analyzes Kafka’s The Castle in terms of how it takes its place among the criticisms to this ideal with a literary dimension.In his famous work Castle, Kafka, evaluate the modern bureaucracy and its impact on the society in a different perspective from Weber who deal with modern society with the context of rationalization. For a better understanding of the novel, it may be necessary to make a double-layer reading of it. Because, until the last pages of the novel, it is thought that modern bureaucracy as a structure is constructed in the context of “nonsense” not “rationality”. The bureucratic mechanism that woven by hundreds of details in the novel, neither its officality nor its domination built on invididuals, and its decision have no rational ground.Until the end of the novel, the plot of the novel’s effect on the readers is like that. However, with the dialogues in the last pages, it is seen that behind all the details,the meaningless officiality, domination and the decisions of bureaucracy, there is a fiction that unite and rasyonalize all these factors. The reader that get bored from nonsenses and details throughout the novel, with these dialogues,realize that all these nonsenses and details have an order and they serve büreaucratic mechanism which symbolise with the Castle.