The received view regards the agent's experience and the external world as split by an unsurmountable metaphysical gulf; while an agent's desires belong to the inner and motivate her to act in one or another way, the outer is presented as a domain deprived of any evaluative properties. *In the Retrieval of Ethics*, Talbot Brewer argues that we can hardly make sense of our agency if the inner and the outer are thus kept apart, since an agent's motivations must be sensitive to the good and the good must be placed on the outside; it must be experienced as something she confronts. In this paper, I will stress that, in *The Castle*, there is no way in which K. might succeed in separating the inner from the outer; far from being split by a gulf, the inner and the outer will emerge as densely interwoven in his life. It follows that the received view can hardly account for the way K. inhabits the world. The interconnection between the inner and the outer certainly fits with Brewer's approach but, as we shall finally argue, the precise way in which the novel conceives of this interconnection hardly benefits Brewer's aspiration to retrieve our agency