الإصدار 5 - العدد 13 (2026-04-20)

Fictional Elements in Franz Kafka’s “The Castle” and Edwin Abbott’s “Flat Land": A Literary Analysis

Instructor: Iman Saud Dhannoon

Faculty of Medicine-University of Tikrit-Iraq

This paper is a comparative literary review of fictionalism elements in The Castle by Franz Kafka and Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott in terms of how constructive imagination works as a tool of political, social, and epistemological criticism. Though these two texts are separated by the time gap, style, and literary movement, they both use some unique fictional techniques to challenge power, social stratification, and the boundaries of human knowledge. Using the method of qualitative close reading that relies on the principles of comparative literary methodology, the study examines such main aspects of fiction as world-building, symbolism, allegory, narrative distortion, and characterization. The findings reveal that Kafka constructs an ambiguous, fragmented bureaucratic universe that reflects modernist concerns with alienation and institutional opacity, while Abbott designs a mathematically ordered two-dimensional society that satirizes Victorian class stratification, gender discrimination, and intellectual rigidity. In both, fictional distortion is not a form of escapism but rather a structuring way of philosophical questioning. The expression of authority, which is expressed either as an invisible bureaucratic abstraction or as overt geometric hierarchy, nevertheless, in each instance, institutional power limits the agency and epistemological growth of individuals. Moreover, the narrative technique as such represents a philosophical tool: the incomplete and fragmented structure of Kafka is the manifestation of existential doubt, and the rational and didactic narration of Abbott is the manifestation of ideological isolation. The paper concludes that fictional construction on both texts is a critical tool by which power and limitation of perception systems are brought to light. Having framed modernist existential ambiguity to become a subject of discussion to Victorian speculative satire, this study proves that fictional abstraction moves across history and continues to be an effective means of literary intervention in the discussions of power, knowledge and the freedom of human.