Conclusion: Interminable Subjects

Abstract

The narrative “geography” of “A County Doctor” goes nowhere, fast, but goes nowhere, slow, too. The Castle, famously unfinished yet evocatively “paused” without closing punctuation in its final line, marks Kafka’s unbroken fixation on indeterminate occupation and subjection. Kafka’s nonhuman form is never complete. The Castle is Kafka’s true masterpiece of indirect discourse, despite The Trial’s remorseless commitment to the legal execution of this indirect discursive subject. It wanders to a devastating non-halt, refusing both narrative expectation and, unlike The Trial, subjective closure. One can be done with The Trial, even as it confounds by its violent refusals of non-administered experience, but not with The Castle, which demolishes its supposed subject “wholly,” in full, by refusing to terminate in any form.