The judgment

About Franz Kafka writer

Franz Kafka was born on 3
Franz Kafka was born on 3rd July 1883 in Prague, Bohemia. He was the eldest son of the family. He
belongs to an upper-middle-class family.  Franz Kafka was a Bohemian short-story writer and novelist.
He was German-speaking and widely regarded as one of the influential figures of the literature of the
20th-century. His works are a blend of elements of fantasy and realism. His short stories and novels
feature the protagonists that are completely isolated, encountering surrealistic or bizarre predicaments
and inconceivable socio-bureaucratic powers. It explores themes of guilt, absurdity, existential anxiety,
and alienation.

STYLE OF WRITING
Franz Kafka is considered one of the most persuasive and important literary figures of the twentieth
century. The writing style of Franz Kafka created such an impact that it got a special adjective
“Kafkaesque.” The terms “Kafkaesque” refers to the style that has bizarre elements in it. It is also
considered as a synonym for the term “Surreal.”

The stories of Kafka are extraordinarily strange. It symbolizes the absurdity and weirdness of life. He
created characters that are psychologically deep and features the surreal and bizarre side of thinking
and imagination. Kafka splendidly revels in playing with metaphors. His expression was also essentially
metaphorical in enunciation. In short, Kafka was weaving a web of complexity in his works that were
characteristically critical to interpreting.

Franz Kafka is one of the widely studied writers. His works are among the forefront of thesis and
dissection. His stories “In the Penal Colony,” “The Metamorphosis,” and “The Judgment” are categorized
among the most widely read stories.  His short story “The Trail” is one of the best long fictions of Kafka.
The short story is based on the trappings based on misinformation that has attained the status of mythic
imagery symbolizes the world gone crazy.

The unique writing style of Franz Kafka is largely based on his thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and his
relationship with people and family.  The following are the unique characteristics of Franz Kaka’s writing
style.

DIVERSITY IN KAFKA’S WORKS

The prose style of Kafka permits readers and critics to examine and interpret it at various levels. His
writings have been placed into a large number of literary schools of thought. Some critics claim his
writing to be misinterpreting reality, whereas other critics claim that he has been critiquing capitalism in
his work.
His works have common elements of hopelessness and absurdity. These elements can be seen as his
illustration of existentialist beliefs. Some works of Kafka are also appeared to be influenced by the
movement of expressionism. However, the majority of his literary works are linked with the
experimental modernist genre. The versatility and diversity in the writing stories and novels of Franz
Kafka epitomize his writing style.

THE JUDGMENT SUMMARY

‘The Judgment’, written in 1912, was in many ways Franz Kafka’s breakthrough work. In this short story,
A merchant named Georg Bendemann is writing a letter to a friend of his who moved to Russia several
years earlier. This friend’s business is in trouble. Georg is writing to tell his friend that he is engaged to
be married to a wealthy woman named Frieda Brandenfeld.

During the course of writing his letter, Georg stops to go and check on his invalid father, who still
appears as a ‘giant’ to his son. Georg tells his father that he is writing a letter to his friend, but his father
questions the existence of the friend. He also questions his son’s knowledge of business, and accuses
Georg of being less upset by the death of his mother than he should have been.

Georg’s father becomes increasingly cruel in his comments towards his son, accusing Georg of wanting
him dead merely because Georg tries to persuade his father to lie down. He also criticises Georg’s
neglect of his friend who moved to Russia. In the end, his comments cause Georg to cower in the corner
of the room.

But the final blow is when Georg’s father accuses him of being selfish. He sentences his son to death by
drowning; upon the utterance of these words, Georg feels himself being pushed from the room and he
runs away to a bridge over some water. He throws himself into the water, presumably drowning, just as
an ‘unending stream of traffic’ goes over the bridge.

‘The Judgment’: analysis

Even the title of this early work by Kafka, ‘The Judgment’, gives a clue to its ‘Kafkaesque’ qualities (more
on that word below). Kafka’s big themes are law, crime, guilt, punishment, and judgment: both the
judgment that comes from state authorities and that from more personal qualities, including our own
families, and even ourselves.

‘The Judgment’ is, like much of Kafka’s writing, highly autobiographical. Kafka’s own father was a
domineering presence in his son’s life, and was frequently irascible and unpredictable. Fathers, or their
stand-ins, tend to be unsympathetic to their sons’ plight in Kafka’s work: in ‘The Metamorphosis’, which
we have analysed here, Gregor Samsa’s father throws apple at his son, who has been transformed

into a giant beetle or ‘vermin’. In The Trial, Josef K.’s uncle, a variation on the judgmental father
figure, is more concerned with the shame his nephew is bringing upon the family than he is about his
nephew’s own welfare. And the Commandant of Kafka’s short story ‘In the Penal Colony’ is, in a sense,
the ultimate towering father-figure, to whom deference is demanded at all times.
In ‘The Judgment’, note how the father’s opinion of Georg so clearly matters to the young merchant.
Although his father has been made weak by illness and dependent on his son for care and support (one
explanation for his resentment and consequent treatment of his son), he still appears as a ‘giant’ to
George, as if the adult has been rendered a small child once more. And as Georg’s father launches a
psychological assault on his son (sounding more and more like an elderly man who has lost his sense of
perspective, or has perhaps even been afflicted with something like dementia), Georg finds that,
although he knows his father is not speaking the truth, he is hard-wired to be emotionally affected by his
words.

Kafka has been named as a key influence on later magic realist fiction, and mysterious force which
appears to propel Georg from the room and to his death at the end of the story is a kind of absurdist
exaggeration of the pull (or, in this case, push) that a parental figure can have on their child, even once
that ‘child’ has grown up into an adult. Of course, Georg’s father does not have any official power to
‘condemn’ his son to ‘death by drowning’, but the words have such an impact on him that he
nevertheless goes straight out, like a hypnotised victim or automaton, and throws himself into the
water.

This, too, is of a piece with Kafka’s other protagonists, who either come to a premature end at their own
hand (in ‘The Metamorphosis’, Gregor Samsa takes his own life to spare his family the shame of living
with a giant ‘vermin’) or who are killed by some mysterious agents of the state, having come to half-
believe in their own guilt (at the end of The Trial, which we have analysed here, Josef K. is
stabbed, having earlier been arrested for some unspecified crime).

In each case, there is a focus on the worthlessness of these protagonists: Josef K.’s last words, to
describe his own death, are ‘like a dog!’, while Gregor is literally  transformed into ‘monstrous
vermin’, a bug or beetle or some other creature (contrary to popular belief, Kafka’s original German
does not identify the animal). And Georg Bendemann, too, is seen as worthless to his own father,
especially when unfavourably compared with his friend who moved away to Russia.