When he hears they have business at the inn he shouts that he has business there too. They do not stop. What happens next reveals the attitude of total acceptance which, because it is normally excluded by man contemplating his disturbed surroundings, is presented here as an incident which must seem rationally incomprehensible.

K. reaches the inn. Arthur and Jeremiah are waiting for him. ‘Who are you?’ says K. They tell him they are his assistants. K., nominally a land surveyor, is expecting the arrival of his old assistants, but these two are strangers. They come from the castle. K. knows this, and we know that he knows it. In a rational human context we should expect him to laugh at their impudence or ignore them or kick them out as impostors. He does none of these things. ‘What?’ he asks, ‘you’re my old assistants whom I had follow me, whom I’ve been expecting?’ They reply that they are. ‘That’s good,’ K. says after a pause, ‘it’s good that you’ve come.’

Is he mad or blind? The pause is put there by Kafka. It seems to betray his awareness of human imperfection. In the realm of total acceptance there are no accidents. He once told a friend accidents do not exist in the world but only in our heads. There is no world without causation, and the idea of accident reflects the limits of human perception, our inability to know all connections and so pursue total causality. No contradictions can exist where connection is complete. The same friend took Kafka to an exhibition of Picasso paintings and expressed his opinion that this artist is guilty of wilful distortion. Kafka said he did not think so: ‘He merely notes the abnormalities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror which “runs fast” like a clock – sometimes.’

Kafka’s images are of a world not yet discovered. Here the understanding is stretched beyond rational comprehension, beyond the limits of perceptible experience. Nobody has been here before. We are in the realms where imagination is waiting for life to catch up. It is a world where things just happen and are not committed in advance to the limits of human understanding. This makes the difficulty. How do we comprehend what is deliberately beyond our comprehension? The reader too needs a sense of wonder, belief that there is truth in the inexplicable rock to which this modern Prometheus is chained.

In the incident about the assistants who are at the same time both known and unknown Kafka the novelist brings together in one image the seeming contradiction of uncertainty and confident trust which exists in him and drives him on.