A Narratological Exploration Of Kafka’s Novel The Castle

Franz Kafka (1883-1924), one of the best European writers in the20th century, is eulogized as the great master and brave explorer of western literature of modernism. Kafka, to some great extent, could be regarded as one of the first vital personages among the modernistic novelists. Therefore, we need to enter the Kafka’s literary world, reading his significant works and feeling the darkness of the society and the ugliness of humanity, and then to gain an insight into the understanding of western literature in the20th century.This thesis, guided by the theory of French narratologist Genette and famous Chinese scholar Shen Dan, sets out to carry out a narratological study of Kafka’s novel The Castle from three aspects:narrative focalization, narrative time and narrative discourse respectively. The paper, in its study of narratological features in the work, makes an effort to present the way Kafka relies on his unique narrative techniques to convey the subtlety and complexity of meanings embodied in The Castle, and how he strategically sheds light to enable readers to arrive at the theme lying underneath-"The bewilderment and predicament of modern human".The thesis consists of six chapters-introduction, a literature review of Kafka and The Castle, narrative focalization, narrative time, narrative discourse and conclusion.The first chapter makes a brief introduction to Kafka and his works and the layout of this thesis. The second chapter gives an overall review of Kafka and his works, including Kafka overseas and domestic researches. In the literature review of the various criticisms on The Castle, the paper categorizes the studies into several perspectives, on the basis of which the paper lays down the justification for the present research of The Castle from narratology. Moreover, it makes a brief introduction to the theoretic framework of Genette’s narratology applied in the thesis.The third chapter is a study of the narrative focalization of The Castle. It analyzes the text from the zero focalization, internal focalization and external focalization, elaborating on how they give a full description of characters with their perplexed, alienated state of being on the way to exploring the unknown world and the subtle complicated human relationships.The fourth chapter proceeds to the analysis of narrative time, including order, duration and frequency; and putting an emphasis on how Kafka applies this narrative technique to display the difficulties and hardships K. encounters on the way to fulfilling his dream.The fifth chapter is on narrative discourse; it makes a detailed analysis of the characters’speeches and thoughts from narrated discourse, indirect reported discourse and dramatic reported discourse respectively, offering a clue on how it helps to reveal the different thoughts, feelings and values of different characters and presents their completely diverse survival plight.The last chapter concludes the study of the paper; the significance of Kafka’s narrative techniques in respects to the narrative focalization, narrative time and narrative discourse emerges; furthermore, it points out the limitations of this thesis and proposes the suggestions for the future study.Applying the narrative theory of Genette and Shen Dan, this paper analyzes the unique narrative strategies of The Castle. By his marvelous play of narrative, Kafka shows us a real human world. Through his manipulation, a complete view of humanity is presented before readers with its intense absurd and burlesque implications:castle and village, funny castle officials and villagers and persistent protagonist K. Each reader can find his own microcosm from The Castle. This excellent literary work The Castle, with its profound essence, inexorably breaks through the limitations of time and space and gives an everlasting representation of the past, the present and the future.