SOURCE: “Perspectives and Truth in ‘The Judgment,’”¹ in The Problem of “The Judgment”: Eleven Approaches to Kafka's Story, edited by Angel Flores, Gordian Press, 1977, pp. 193-237.

In the following essay, Sokel views the protagonist of the novella, Georg, and his unnamed friend living in Russia as representations of Kafka's personal struggles.

“The Judgment,” the work of Kafka's “breakthrough” of September 1912, is thematically, i.e., in terms of mythos or plot content, a continuation of his earliest extant work, “Description of a Struggle” (1904-05). In the frame story of that work, an engaged young man comes to grief under the influence of a bachelor. In the inner story, the Fat Man is separated from the girl he dates by the appearance of a weird, solitary figure, the Praying Man. He comes under the latter's spell and is subsequently drowned—a striking anticipation of Georg Bendemann's fate. Six years after...