In Kafka’s “The Judgment”, Georg’s friend serves to highlight Georg’s position in life and to complicate his relation with his fiancée and his father. We are told about Georg’s friend but we’re told very little about him, not even his name. We do know that the friend has left his home city for a far-away strange place, Russia, that his business has stagnated, that he has few social connections, seeming to be becoming a bachelor for good, and that he seems to be unhealthy. By contrast Georg is a successful business man who has taken over much of his family business, and he is engaged to be married.

The situation between Georg and his friend is a little strange. The author does not make very clear the relation between Georg and his friend, which is, we are told, both close and distant, so close he cannot tell him about his coming marriage, for instance. When Georg and his fiancée are having a conversation about this, she says to him “I really do feel offended”     (Kafka, 61). There they start arguing about why Georg doesn’t want to tell his friend about his marriage. Georg’s relationship with his friend is disrupting Georg’s life because he can’t decide what to do. Because of Georg’s friend Georg is not only having trouble with his future wife but with his father as well. In one long conversation his father says to Georg, “Do no deceive me. It is a trivial matter, it is not worth wasting one’s breath on, so do not hoodwink me”. (64) One role of the friend in the story makes the reader more anxious to know what is going to happen next. Georg is taking care of his business family and soon will get married with a very eligible young woman. However, his friend is having a difficult life in Russia . Furthermore, Georg’s friend seems to be a imaginary character which make the reader confused and also make the reader to question himself in a way that there are scene that Kafka doesn’t make it understandable.

The story seems to be part of the surrealism because surrealism is “the combination of unrelated images or events in a very strange and dreamlike way”.  Kafka’s surrealism involves a very realistic description of events so strange they could only occurring in a nightmare. The story begins very normally but at the end it ends with a surrealistic ending.

In The Judgement, Kafka used Georg to represent himself. I think “the friend” is another representation of Kafka. He represents the ideal person that Kafka wants to be. As Cindy mentioned in the class, Kafka was a perfectionist and he thought marriage will ruin his life. In the story, Georg was engaged with a woman from a rich family. The friend was a bachelor. He moved to Russia to start a business and has no social life. Georg is quite successful and the friend lives an isolated life. The contrast between the friend and Georg is very striking here. Georg’s life represents the life that Kafka have now and the friend’s life is what Kafka wants to live. The friend might be a figure that Kafka portrayed to express his willingness to remain single and focus on his work.

The conversation between Georg and his wife helped to support my conjecture. When Georg was telling his fiancée about the friend, his fiancée said “If you have such friends, Georg, you should never have gotten engaged in the first place.” Georg replied “Well, we are both at fault; but I would not have it any other way now (p.61). It is quite strange that the fiancée said this to Georg. There is no connection between the friend and the fiancée and she has no reason to consider the friend in their engagement. I do not think the friend will affect their marriage at all. One possibility I can think of is that Georg is using the story of “the friend” to tell his fiancée that he was that kind of person and that is the life he wants to live. This quote also implies that she will not marry Georg if he will act like “the friend”. Georg also said “That is how I am, and that is how he must take me.” In this quote, Kafka implicitly shows that he does not want to marry her and he is planning to live like “the friend”.

The complexity between the friend and Georg in this story reminds me of surrealism. Surrealism is the combination of imagination and reality. In The Judgement, Georg was the character that represents reality and “the friend” represents an imaginary figure. There are many possibilities that exist between them. Kafka never give a clear and definite description to them and their relationship is very ambiguous. The story is very mysterious and we can never thoroughly analyze every single character.

In Kafka’s The Judgment, the elusive “friend” is a topic of much discussion. The “friend” is a more hazy and murky character, never really defined or given much of a back story. The reader does not know much except for the fact he is in Russia, is not successful in his business, and is sickly. The way Georg, the protagonist and narrator, refers to this friend is in a way that does not convince readers of amicableness. Georg seems to be rather pretentious in his manner towards the friend, as if he is better than him. The friend seems rather indifferent and even impersonal to Georg. Either way, for two people who are supposed to be close because they grew up together, they seem as if they are no longer friends. In the beginning, I believed that the friend was just a technique used by Kafka to encourage the reader to finish reading the story. As discussion continued in class, however, I realized that there was more to the “friend” that I had originally thought. A suggestion made in class was that the friend, juxtapositioned with Georg, was an image of Kafka’s life and the struggle between safe and secure and a life filled with passion for his chosen wanted career. This is evident when a reader makes the parallel between Georg, his relationship, his response to his relationship in regards to his “friend”, and Kafka’s life. Georg is engaged to a Frieda and it is implied that the relationship is one of convenience. Georg does not want to mention this relationship to hi friend in Russia for many reasons. Mainly, he doesn’t want to flaunt his relationship, and subsequently his great life, to a friend who has nothing. It is also implied that perhaps there was something going on between Frieda and this friend. In relation to Kafka’s life, in class it was mentioned that Kafka did not believe in marriage and that even though he had a fiancée at one point, he broke off the engagement because he could not bring himself to marry her. Perhaps the apprehension to tell this new to the friend is the same apprehension that Kafka had when he broke off his relationship with his fiancée. It is due to the obvious connections between Kafka’s life and Georg that I strongly believe that the sole purpose of the “friend” is an outlet to describe Kafka’s dream life.

In “The Judgement,” Kafka portrays Georg as a steady man with a good business and a mediocre life. He is meant to get married to his fiance and deliberates whether of not he should let his childhood friend in Russia know of his engagement. Georg’s uneasiness about telling his friend suggests that his friend serves as everything Georg would be giving up when he will be getting married.

Georg’s friend is portrayed as everything that Georg is not. Georg is stable, with a job, and family. His friend is described to have “virtually fled” to Russia without any ties (p. 58). Additionally, Georg never gives us a clear picture of his friend. While Georg’s picture is imagined very easily, he describes his friend with “a full exotic beard poorly concealing his face” and as a “big child” (p, 57). The adjectives that Georg gives to describe his friend leave the reader confused and unable to fully picture the friend.

This friend of Georg’s seems to represent everything that Georg will be giving up when he gets married. This is why he is so afraid of telling him of his engagement. He feels that once he tells the friend, the engagement will be real and he will have to give up everything he is without being bound down. When Georg cannot decide whether he should inform his friend or not, he actually just cannot decide if he himself wants to get married or not. In trying to figure out whether to tell his friend, he tells his father: “I didn’t want to tell him I was engaged. To spare his feelings…I told myself that he could hear about my engagement from someone else, although that would be quite unlikely, given his solitary lifestyle” (p.63). However, the father knows there is more to what Georg is saying and tells him: “Do not deceive me. It’s a trivial matter, it is not worth wasting one’s breath on, so do not hoodwink me. Do you really have that friend in St. Petersburg?” (pg. 64). It seems that even his father does not believe that his friend is real. And, the paradoxes that Georg continually uses to describe his friend make the reader believe that this friend is not real, as well.

Georg seems to yearn freedom. However, his engagement is making him feel bound down and scared to commit to it.

In the reading, “The Judgement,” Georg’s friend never replied to any of his letters, except once when Georg tells his friend about his mother passing away. I find this to be very odd as to why he never replies, since friends typically do when communicating with one another. I also find it strange that this friend does not have a name and not much is known about him. From reading the story, we know that this friend had virtually fled to Russia and isolated himself from society. This seems to be a reflection of Kakfa’s own life; he is able to write when he is secluded. Although this text was very confusing to me, I find that this friend may represent the author and his own internal conflict. In the story, the friend is described as an unsuccessful and lonely bachelor, which is the exact opposite of Georg, who was successful in his business and was engaged. The friend may be the part of Kafka that he wants to suppress by trying to live the life that Georg has: social and successful. This is why Georg is conflicted about telling his friend about the engagement; he himself is unsure as to whether or not he wants this friend to come back because the friend is a hinderance to his “successful” life. Also, if he tells the friend about what is happening in his life, his friend would not feel happy and miserable because of his failure. Although Kafka wanted to become a writer, this would hinder him from having a “successful life” and his own father also opposed of him writing. But as we read the story, we realize that although Georg is living as a prosperous businessman, he does not seem to actually like his life; he is not able to live out his desired life of becoming a writer.

I also don’t fully understand why his friend only replies to his father. His father, who seems very overpowering over Georg, mocks Georg by comparing him to his friend; “he knows everything a hundred times better than you do yourself, in his left hand he crumples your letters unopened while in his right hand he holds up my letters to read them!” (Page 70) This reflects Kafka’s own life, where his father also was overpowering and did not approve of him writing .

Franz Kafka is known for creating disturbed and unsettling literary art; something uncomfortable that would cut through the ice. In The Judgement, Kafka introduces an unnamed character in St. Petersburg who is living an unstable life while his childhood acquaintance in Prague, Georg Bendemann, sends him letters of inconsequential news. The friend may represent one of Kafka’s identities and throughout the whole story, the relationship between the unnamed friend and Georg seem to be blurred. Kafka insinuates that there are multiple sides to a person and that every single being will never be identical; one cannot judge a person based on stability.

The unnamed friend is the opposite of Georg and he had virtually fled away from Prague to this foreign country with no real ties and social dealings in the local colony of St. Petersburg. The act of fleeing away from home is the result to a new life and experience. The friend was discontented with his development at home so he discovered Russia and isolated himself. Kafka can relate to this in his writing and he isolated himself from the outside world and decided to compose a literary work in one night.

The friend is characterized to have a disease that nears his death at such a young age.
“..whose sallow complexion seemed to indicate a developing disease.” (57)
“…your friend is going to the dogs in his Russia, three years ago he was already yellow enough to be dumped out,..” (71)
His disease may have occurred during his stay at St. Petersburg and this embodies a sign of weakness and that the end is near. Living in St. Petersburg becoming a bachelor for good depicts that there is no progress with his life. The experience he wanted to encounter was a complete downfall due to his own business stagnating. The full exotic beard and his poorly concealing face indicates that he is not taking care of himself and is slowly letting himself go. Maybe he does not have the strength and power to succeed because he needs to have someone to depend on. The reason Georg did not mention his fiancee to him was because he may be envious of him or feel pressured. The friend was struggling to live by himself while Georg was this man of stability and success. Although you can question Georg’s superego because the power of his father’s words had led to his own downfall.
“So now you know what else there was in the world besides you, previously you only knew about yourself! You were truly an innocent child, but you were even more truly a diabolical man! And therefore know: I hereby condemn you to death by drowning!” (71)

Kafka explains the judgement of the two men reflected in this story. You cannot judge a man by his own success of living because every being is significantly differential. Georg having a fiancee and a successful business gave him the ability to have a stable life but his moral sense had overpowered him when he committed suicide. The friend living an unstable life in Russia lacks motivation for success due to his fleeing away from home, the health condition he encounters and his isolation from others. One cannot be successful without the help and support of others.

Throughout the narrative, Georg’s friend was never given a stable, distinct identity. Rather, Kafka provided several hints as to the friend’s living conditions and relationship to Georg. At first, the friend served to be a mysterious entity that Georg was almost obsessed with; this friend obviously means a lot to Georg and is an obstacle in his relationship with his father and fiancée.

Georg described his friend as inferior to him. His friend was dissatisfied with his life and virtually fled to Russia, where he knew no one and had “no real ties with the local colony . . . and almost no social dealings with native families, he was settling in to become a bachelor for good” (58). In this instance, the friend is also the opposite of Georg since Georg was about to be married and his business is quite successful. However, as much as Georg is fascinated with his friend, he is conflicted about his friend’s return and is surely keeping his distance. Georg refuses to update his friend on his good fortunes, making us believe that the reason for this is to spare his friend’s feelings. On that note, he claims that he wants his friend to return home, but then comes up with a lot of excuses and reasons of why it’s best that his friend does not return, most of it concerning his own needs as to deal with his troublesome friend and to explain to his friend about the three years of his lives that he failed to mention. Therefore, Georg is acting as if he is a worried friend, but in reality is shameful of his friend and wants to keep him at a letter’s distance.

This friend becomes an obstacle in Georg’s relationship to his father and fiancée because the friend is someone that Georg wants all to himself, he does not want to share him. There is a lot ambiguity and paradox in the story, but after learning about Kafka’s past, I believe that his friend serves to be Georg’s or rather, Kafka’s inner self. This friend represents the other side of Kafka, the unsuccessful, lonely and hidden part of him. Georg is conflicted about sharing the truth, he does not know how to tell his friend about his recent stages of his life, because though it may seem successful and happy for one part of him, it also brings trouble and misery for the other part. Therefore, I see Georg and his friend as the two halves of Kafka.

Cindy Chan

It’s difficult to make definitive statements when analyzing The Judgment, for Kafka prized ambiguity over plot continuity. It’s no surprise that there are various interpretations of the characters and their significance in this story.

At first blush, the friend in St. Petersburg seems to have an unexpectedly significant influence over Georg and his relationships with his father and fiancee. Upon closer inspection, one may surmise that Mr. St. Petersburg is Kafka’s ego in a way. The friend has “virtually fled” to Russia, perhaps doing so to flee judgment, he is not successful, and has settled for the bachelor life. All of these attributes are reflected in Kafka on a subliminal level. Kafka resented his father’s disapproval of his writing. Although Kafka was successful as a senior executive at an insurance company, it was not the kind of success that satisfied him. Kafka was also torn by the notion that marriage was a betrayal of his literary lifestyle.

In the same vein, Georg and his father may also be interpreted as Kafka’s other alter egos. Georg may be seen as the part of Kafka desperately clinging to the concept of a normal, married life. On the other hand, Georg’s father may be seen as the part of Kafka that reprimands the part that dares to forsake art for normality.

I believe some of the many calculated points of ambiguity and plot discontinuity in the story lend credibility to this interpretation:

• “If you have such friend, Georg, you should never have gotten engaged in the first place.” (61)
  • This statement, which veers startling from the flow of the conversation, is perhaps a reflection of Kafka’s view on marriage.
• Why was George compelled to tell his father about a matter as trivial as a letter to a distant friend? Perhaps this development was to set the stage for the three way struggle (in a sense) between Georg, his friend, and his father.
• “…in order to satisfy your lust with her unhampered, you disgraced our mother’s memory, betrayed your friend, and put your father to bed so that he can’t move. But he can move or can’t he?” (69)
  • This may reflect Kafka’s unshakable feeling that romance betrays his passion for writing.
• “…he knows everything a hundred times better than you do yourself…” (70)
  • This may suggest that the part of Kafka that values literature outweighs the part of him that yearns for companionship.

In “The Judgment” by Franz Kafka, the relationship between Georg and the friend develops throughout the whole story. I believe the role of the friend in St. Petersburg is to represent the fact that things do not always end up the way the individual would like it to.

In the beginning of the story, I questioned what was the purpose of the friend, and what was his obligation to his friend? However, now I believe the idea that Kafka used this friend was to show how superior he was to his friend, but how he was still in a way the loser at the end of the story. For example, the friend was described as one who was “dissatisfied with his progress at home, had virtually fled to Russia many years ago. Now in St. Petersburg, he was running a business… appeared to have been stagnating for quite a while” (57), where as Georg business “had quite unexpectedly prospered during those two years, they had had to double the staff, sales had quintupled, and further growth, was no doubt, just around the corner” (60). Based off these two quotes, the readers can see the clear difference between the two characters. The friend is not successful in a foreign country, where Georg is a huge hit in his hometown. This shows how superior Georg is. Another example that shows Georg superiority is when it states that the friend “having no real ties with the local colony of his compatriots and almost no social dealings with native families, he was settling in to become a bachelor for good” (58), but Georg “had gotten engaged one month ago to a Fraulein Frieda Brandenfeld, a girl from a well-to-do family” (60). Here, the readers can also notice that the friend seems to be an isolated person, not really having an form of social ties, whereas Georg is getting married and is basically entering a binding contract for the rest of his life. From these two examples, it shows a sense that Georg is superior to his friend. His life is definite, where he was successful and getting married, where his friend’s life is more blurry, where he is not succeeding, lonely, and living in another country. Even though I believe that the role of the friend is to show how inferior he is to Georg, it also leads to the idea that even though Georg is more successful than his friend, he did not win at the end. In the end, the father reveals that the friend “knows everything! I’ve been writing to him because you forgot to take away my writing things…he crumples up your letters in his left hand without reading them while he holds up my letters in his right hand to read them” (70)! But, on the other hand, George “leaped from the front door and dashed across the roadway, driven toward the water” (72). This just goes to show that even though Georg’s life seem better in the beginning with his happy career, and family, he ended up committing suicide at the end, whereas the friend who seemed to be at rock bottom, actually knew everything and could not be fooled by Georg. This leads readers to believe that you cannot take anything for granted in the beginning because things do not always end up how it seems. There is no definite ending that can be assumed until it actually happens, and there could be no limit placed on the infinite amount of opportunities existing. People must understand that life is full of endless possibilities and that no one will ever know how it will end.

One thing is necessary above all if one is to practice reading as an art in this way, something that has been unlearned most thoroughly nowadays […] something for which one has almost to be a cow and in any case not a ‘modern man’: rumination. 

Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887