KAFKA’s POWERFUL IMAGINATION was always threatening to run amok, and he himself spoke of writing as though in a tunnel, without knowing how his characters would turn out (Martini 298.) In the manuscript of Das Schloß (The Castle) the originally garrulous hero blabs out information that Kafka wished to hide, and develops other traits that are equally uncongenial to his creator. So, like a gardener faced with an unruly shrub, Kafka pruned back his fictional alter ego. His goal throughout the simultaneous process of writing and revising was to preserve an aura of ineffable mystery by making everything sound “ein wenig unheimlich,” (a little uncanny, SA 275).

While the following close reading of Kafka’s deletions in the manuscript of Das Schloß will not yield an entirely new interpretation of the novel, it may offer glimpses of the creative decision-making process that shaped it. Surprisingly enough, although scholars such as Hartmut Binder, Karlheinz Fingerhut, and Fritz Martini have explored the variants to other texts of Kafka’s, relatively little work has been done on the exceptionally rich cache first published in the 1982 Apparatband (variant volume) of the Critical Edition of Das Schloß, with the noteworthy exception of some astute commentary by its editor Malcolm Pasley and a lucid 1968 essay by Dorrit Cohn. That is a pity because a close examination of Kafka’s writing process in the manuscript of Das Schloß can shed light on the workings of his imagination.

In composing Das Schloß Kafka appears not to have had any preliminary outline but simply made things up as he went along — a remarkable method of composition given the intricate nature of the novel. According to Pasley, Kafka carried out the vast majority of the revisions and deletions on the spot, immediately after writing a given phrase, sentence, or segment. Yet, as I hope to show, his method of composition is as calculated as it is spontaneous.

Since most of Kafka’s cross-outs have never appeared in English translation, and were not included in my translation of the text of the Critical Edition (Schocken Books, 1998), I will quote them liberally, in German followed by my fairly literal translation, while exploring the following topics:

I. Biographical variants: Kafka deletes passages that disclose the intimacy of the relationship between the fictional K. of Das Schloß and the biographical Kafka of the diaries and letters.