Mr. K has just arrived in a village to carry out a job, but when he tries to approach the authorities, who live in a mysterious castle, everything gets complicated. His attempts to establish contact with these people are in vain. In addition to a critique of bureaucracy, in The Castle, as in other works by Frank Kafka, existentialist philosophy is found in the background of its plot. Marked by a surrealist tone, the work transmits to the reader the existential anguish of someone who seeks to be part of the system and is constantly rejected.

Although he is considered one of the most important authors of the 20th century, Kafka did not want to publish much of his work and, in fact, before he died he asked for his manuscripts to be destroyed. Some, however, like this unfinished novel, ended up in print. The mixture of reality and fantasy, as well as the habitual obsessive and oppressive tone of the situations he describes, has given us a new adjective: Kafkaesque, with which to express the nature of an event that is both unusual and distressing.