Alienation, Authority, and the Tragic Individual
A Comparative Study of K. in Kafka’s The Castle and Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
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Personal Information:
Name:- Khushi Goswami
Batch:- M.A.Sem 1 (2024-2026)
Enrollment no:- 5108240001
E-mail Address:- khushigoswami05317@gmail.com
Roll no:- 8
Assignment Details:
Topic:- A Comparative Study of K. in Kafka’s The Castle and Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
Paper :- 107 The Twentieth century literature: From WWII to the End of Century
Subject Code: 22400
Submitted To:- Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar
Date of Submission:- 17 April,2025
Kafka,Orwell,K.,Winston Smith, The Castle,Nineteen Eighty Four, Bureaucracy, Totalitarianism, Alienation, Existentialism,Resistance, Language and Power, Surveillance, Identity Crisis,Modernism, Dystopia
#Table of Content:
Introduction
About novels
K. and Winston Smith: The Isolated Protagonists
Ambiguity vs. Totalitarianism
Motivation and Resistance
Psychological and Existential Dilemma
Philosophical and Allegorical Readings
Conclusion
References
1.Introduction
Franz Kafka and George Orwell are two literary colossi who, in spite of writing within distinct historical environments, have a profound understanding of the human condition beneath systemic repression. Both have protagonists ‘K.’ in ‘The Castle’ (1926) and ‘Winston Smith’ in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1949) who symbolize the contemporary individual seeking significance, autonomy, and truth in environments in which power is exercised in unseen yet inevitable forms. This essay contrasts the figure of K., a surveyor stuck in an infinite loop of bureaucratic procedures, with Winston Smith, a low-ranking clerk fighting against the all-powerful forces of a totalitarian regime. We look at how both figures encapsulate the alienated contemporary self, stuck in both external and internalized systems, through an in-depth analysis of their psychological complexity, narrative function, symbolic significance, and existential conflict.
2.About Novels
Franz Kafka's The Castle
Kafka's The Castle (Das Schloss) is one of the most mysterious works of 20th-century literature. It is about a land surveyor called K. who comes to a snow-covered village ruled by an elusive Castle administration. Though "summoned," K. is received with puzzlement and apathy. His efforts to approach Castle representatives and gain recognition are stymied by boundless bureaucracy, mixed messages, and co-operation from the villagers. While the novel was abandoned, its thematic vision is resolved: it critiques power, exclusion, futility, and existential hunger for justification within an anonymizing system.
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is a vision of a totalitarian state in which all spheres of life are dominated by the all-knowing Party. Winston Smith, an apparatchik of the ruling regime, turns into a rebel through the most mundane acts: writing in a diary, falling in love, and looking for truth. The novel satirizes mechanisms of control like propaganda, surveillance, language control (Newspeak), and psychological torture. It is a visionary novel, predicting an age when personality and reality will be abolished to make way for ideological conformity.
3.K. and Winston Smith: The Isolated Protagonists
Both K. and Winston are isolated by definition, but in dissimilar ways. K. exists in a physical location but lacks social integration—he is never really embraced by the village or the Castle. Winston occupies a populous city but has solitary and perilous thoughts. Both are outsiders—K. due to his ambiguous origin and role, Winston due to his inner rebellion.
Isolation for K. is geographical and existential. Even his close relationship with Frieda is transactional and short-lived. He is not simply excluded from power; he is excluded from knowledge, never knowing the rules he is expected to play by. Winston's loneliness is psychological. In Oceania, language has been turned into a tool to manipulate thought, and Winston's desire for truth makes him stand out in a world in which lies constitute law. His romance with Julia is short-lived and furtive, providing temporary solace but no long-term resolution.
Both these characters' isolation reflects contemporary existential despair, which philosophers such as Sartre and Camus analyzed. They exist in frameworks where human dignity has no firm ground and where any desire to reassert control is stifled silently or brutally.
4.Ambiguity vs. Totalitarianism
The Castle in the novel by Kafka is an impersonal, unreachable, and perhaps meaningless power. It does not rule through violence, but through bewilderment. Bureaucrats such as Klamm are spoken of but never appear. The power of the Castle is in its distance and obscurity—a control that is argued by scholars of Kafka as more ontological than political. It may stand for divine power, the new state, or just the futility of life. Its impact is experienced not through penalty but through the internalization of helplessness.
By contrast, Orwell's Party is exact, ubiquitous, and ruthlessly effective. It monitors citizens via telescreens, falsifies history, and makes thought a crime. Winston is employed by the Ministry of Truth, falsifying past records to ensure that the Party is always correct. The system is not neutral, but intrusive. It does not depend on ambiguity, but on total domination of language, memory, and belief. Orwell's world is a panopticon, in which monitoring substitutes ambiguity with psychological terror.
Whereas Kafka's system disenfranchises the individual by failing to reply, Orwell's system destroys the individual by enforcing submission. Nevertheless, both depict a world where the individual has no choice but to change their destiny, yet only to be reshaped or wiped out by the system.
5. Motivation and Resistance
K. is driven by a need for belonging and recognition. He wishes to be recognized as a valid actor—a land surveyor with purpose. His opposition is passive but insistent. He composes petitions, asks for interviews and attempts to penetrate the labyrinth of local hierarchies. Defeated, yet he never abandons his efforts. K. is in many respects the existential anti-hero, struggling not for revolution but for pertinence. His opposition is a matter of identity formation.
Winston, by contrast, resists due to ideological disillusionment. He perceives beyond the Party's deceptions and longs for truth, history, and love. His resistance is more explicit and subversive. He harbors "thoughtcrime," experiences illicit intimacy, and fantasizes rebellion. Yet, in contrast to K., Winston's resistance is discovered early on and targeted. He is manipulated, tortured, and ultimately rebuilt by the system.
Where K. resists unobtrusively and is overlooked, Winston is noticed, broken, and conditioned. Their paths represent two sides of modern oppression: Kafka's absurd estrangement and Orwell's totalitarian discipline.
6.Psychological and Existential Dimensions
Both characters portray existential anxiety in a different manner.
K. symbolizes what Albert Camus describes as the absurd hero individual who persists to seek meaning in a world that provides none. His battle against the Castle parallels Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, in which man is damned to an act that is both futile and inevitable. Nevertheless, K. continues to push forward, fueled by a desire to be acknowledged.
Winston's battle is psychological and political rather. His self is not just denied but recast. Using brainwashing techniques, the Party obliterates his past and inserts a new reality. Winston ultimately betrays Julia and conforms to the Party's version of reality, the death of the individual soul. His destiny is more terrifying because it is whole—he is not just excluded but assimilated.
Both characters have a rich inner life, but whereas K.'s thoughts are never fully known—even to himself—Winston's thoughts are crisply defined, perhaps because Orwell wants the reader to experience his rational slide into insanity.
7.Symbolic Function and Allegorical Value
K. is not a conventional character but a symbol of man's search for legitimacy in an meaningless world. His abbreviation of name indicates this loss of personal identity. He could be anyone. His passage through the village is more metaphorical than plot-driven, indicating the infinite deferral of comprehension and acceptance.
Winston, on the other hand, is more of a political allegory. His revolt and failure symbolize Orwell's warning about ideological despotism. Winston's universe reflects Stalinist Russia, where reality was fabricated and opposition exterminated. His final capitulation is a criticism of power without morality, and his name Winston, referencing Churchill—may be ironic, indicating failed opposition.
In both instances, the characters serve as conduits through which the authors comment on their time's biggest fears: Kafka on meaningless bureaucracy, Orwell on absolutist authoritarianism.
8.Language, Communication, and Truth
Language is important in both books. In The Castle, there is indirect communication, delayed and often misinterpreted. Letters from the Castle take a long time to arrive or are written cryptically. Events are differently interpreted by the villagers, which only reinforces confusion. K. grapples not only with bureaucracy but with the breakdown of language in bridging understanding.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, language is used as a means of control. The creation of Newspeak is at the heart of the Party's domination, it prevents the existence of subversive thought by reducing the vocabulary. “Freedom is slavery,” “War is peace,” “Ignorance is strength” such contradictions undermine truth itself. Winston's action of keeping a diary is an act of defiance, affirming the worth of untainted language.
Therefore, while K. experiences linguistic vagueness, Winston experiences linguistic exploitation. In each instance, language does not serve to offer opposition or clarity.
9.The Role of Women and Relationships
Both main characters are involved in relationships that mirror the wider concerns of the books.
The relationship between K. and Frieda is precarious and also greatly affected by social power relations. She is a barmaid who was once seen with Klamm, a Castle administrator, and her involvement with K. is perhaps a desire to regain lost prestige. Their relationship is not warm or intimate and eventually breaks down, mirroring emotional barrenness under bureaucratic control.
Winston's relationship with Julia is spontaneous, passionate, and symbolic of rebellion. It is a temporary return to human contact and reality. But it is short-lived and eventually ruined. Winston and Julia betray each other under torture, highlighting the system's capacity to destroy even love.
In both instances, romantic relationships prove to be ineffective barriers against systemic control. They are either co-opted by the system or destroyed by it.
10.Conclusion
Franz Kafka's K. and George Orwell's Winston Smith are divided by literary tradition modernist absurdity and dystopian realism but joined in their vision of the individual trapped in massive structures of domination. K.'s fight is against a heartless and incomprehensible bureaucracy, Winston's against a totalitarian state that deforms thought and reality. In spite of differences, both men are doomed to lose. One is killed in search of meaning; the other survives having been stripped of self.
Their lives continue to speak with immense significance in the world today, as bureaucratic lethargy and ideological fanaticism continue to test the freedom and dignity of the individual. Through the quiet exclusion or violent assimilation of each, both novels demonstrate how contemporary systems transform human beings into cogs or ghosts, and us to ask—what remains of the self when meaning, love, and truth are withheld?
References:
Kafka, Franz. The Castle. Translated by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, Minerva, 1992.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Penguin UK, 2008.
Freedman, Carl. “ANTINOMIES OF ‘NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR.’” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 30, no. 4, 1984, pp. 601–20. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26282794 . Accessed 14 Apr. 2025.
Dnes, Antony W. “The Autopoietic World of Franz Kafka.” The Independent Review, vol. 25, no. 3, 2020, pp. 425–38. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48617499 . Accessed 14 Apr. 2025.
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