An Imperial Message

Franz Kafka wrote a short piece entitled "An Imperial Message." The piece describes a king on his death bed who wants to send a note to somebody who lives outside the town. The messenger has difficulty making it out of the king's bedroom with all the onlookers crowding into it. Kafka makes it clear that it will be impossible for the messenger to make it to his destination and that the message will be skewed after such a long travel.

After analyzing this work I realized that it has much more meaning that initially meets the eyes. It was suggested in the introduction that the castle stands for God. Viewing the story from this perspective gives lots of meaning to it. With the castle representing God, the main character in the story would represent a faithful and humble person. This person is just waiting for any sign from a higher power, but that sign (message with the messenger) will never come because there are too many obstacles between the higher power and it's believers. In a more broad sense, the castle could represent the absolute truth from any disconnected authority figure, abstract or concrete. What the story is saying, is the average person will never feel a sense of absolute connection with the truth because there are too many thing mudding up the message before it reaches him. If the message ever comes at all.

After some short reading about Kafka's life, I found out that he was indifferent to religion for most of his life. Kafka could have written this story to hide a lesson in it, or try bring realization to others. It seems like he was trying to say that one will never know the absolute truth by waiting for it to come, one must search for it, referring to spirituality. He also might have been trying to say that such matters are futile and that one shouldn't wait for something that will never come and just to go enjoy life instead.