The one Kafka story everyone should read, besides The Trial and Metamorphosis, is Poseidon.
The titular god's life is a Sisyphusian hell of his own making - because of his own pride and stubbornness.
@BaggeByTheSea
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The Burrow is completely devoid of progression of the plot - it ends just as it started. But still the protagonist's situation has gotten worse.
The finest tool of the enlightenment ideals - reason and thought - have utterly betrayed the protagonist and trapped it in a prison of its own making.
Makes a fine parallel to a possible reading of the Metamorphosis, and a common theme in Kafka's writing in general. You can think yourself out of this one.
Gregor Samsa never expressed surprise about being turned into a bug - only irritation about the inconvenience.
And that's one of the most insidious horrors in a Kafka story - the feeling that, at least party, the protagonist deserves what he gets.
If K. was just a bit smarter, or mature, or cold headed and calculating - would he fare as badly? Is his misfortune at least party a punishment for his inadequacy as a human and as an adult?
Sometimes it's said that the eponymous trial is life itself. In that reading, K.s failure is as nothing less than a human being.
When the dust has settled, the bureaucrats have as much power over K. as ever. Made extra clear in The Trial when the audience cheering on said power display in the end, in a chilling reveal, turned out to carry the same uniform as the judge.
The victory was empty. The triumph fleeting. But still, as we as reader stood there with K., it felt SO GOOD.
K. prides himself of his cold head and reason, - but he falls back on childish bully tactics first chance.
There is one interesting scene of triumph repeated in both The Trial and The Castle.
K., in an altercation with a hostile bureaucrat, reaches out and grabs his notebook/document bag and keeps it away like a middle school bully, a symbolic act of castration and dominance. When he scornfully tosses it back, the bureaucrat pathetically clings to it like a child given his blankie while K. proudly towers over his cowed adversary.
But it's not a real victory.
Same with K. in The Trial. Was he really as innocent as he claimed? Would that change our reading?
Even if he was guilty of a horrible crime, the titular Trial was unjust and inhuman - and for me that's the true horror of the story. The trial would care as little of his guilt - were he guilty - as it did about his supposed innocence. Not even such a fundamental part of his own personal history as his guilt or innocence would give K. any power over the process.
If so, would that change how we read him? He would still be stuck in a horrible bureaucracy, but it would be more of his own doing - and he would have a higher degree of freedom to leave.
Was K. in The Castle really the Land surveyor they sent for, or a con man pulling a fast one?