4 ideas
The mayor explains that the summons came from a years-old, misrouted file passed between departments. K. gets two useless assistants and a letter praising work he has never done, and he never reaches the Castle or anyone who can settle his status.
In a large enough administrative system, a mistake is not a fault waiting to be fixed. It is spread across so many offices, files and control departments that no single official owns it. Because each part insists the system does not make errors, the error becomes permanent fact, and the person caught in it must live inside a status that was never really decided.
When the real authority is out of reach, all contact passes through go-betweens: messengers, secretaries, landladies, lovers, rumour. Each has a partial and self-serving account, so the petitioner ends up dealing with the intermediaries rather than the power itself. Read this way, what looks like access to an institution is really a set of relationships with its outer edge, and each relationship has its own motives.
The villagers punish anyone who resists the Castle without being told to. When Amalia refuses an official's obscene summons, her family is shunned and ruined even though the Castle never issues any sanction. Power that stays invisible and never states its will gets its enforcement from ordinary people who guess at what it wants and act first.