SOURCE: “‘The Judgment’,” in Franz Kafka: A Collection of Criticism, edited by Leo Hamalian, McGraw-Hill, 1974, pp. 45–9.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1972, Thorlby links the protagonist of “The Judgment,” Georg Bendemann, to Kafka himself.

[Kafka's first] and apparently harmless meeting [with Felice Bauer] took place on 13 August 1912; but a few days later Kafka recorded the occasion in his diary, concluding his sharp, unflattering description of her appearance with the words: “As I was sitting down I looked at her for the first time more carefully, and when I was seated I had already an unshakeable judgment” [“hatte ich schon ein unerschütterliches Urteil”].

How fateful that look was, and how ambiguous that clear judgment! Was it a judgment on her or on himself? Earlier in the diary entry he remarks against himself how alienated he felt “from everything good in its entirety”; and the first...