Throughout the story “The Judgement” by Franz Kafka, the role of the friend in St. Petersburg is extremely confusing and there are numerous explanations as to what his role is. I do not think there is any clear cut answer or “right” answer as to what role the friend plays in this story.

The imaginary and mysterious friend is described as ” a big child with a fully exotic beard poorly concealing the face.” Yes, these words give the reader a decent image of what the friends face looks like but that is about it. I am not sure why Kafka states the status of the friends facial hair before mentioning characteristics of his personality. This bothered me a great deal.

I struggled to come up with any similarities between George and his friend. A major difference that I noticed was the “successfulness”  of George compared to the failure of his friend. Kafka uses the word “fled”, implying the friend ran away from something. Kafka could have very easily used the word “moved”, instead he used “fled”. I learnt from this that the friend was clearly having some struggles and not having a great life where he was so he was escaping something and fled to St. Petersburg.

” His friend was settling in as a bachelor for good.” Why did this friend have no interest in getting married? Perhaps, it has something to do with his lack of interest in community and being social as a whole. Kafka mentions the friend did not have close ties to the colony. I think this friend was an anti-social human being and this is one of the many reasons that he fled to Russia.

This nameless friend causes a lot of complexion and confusion to George’s life. George discusses in great detail whether or not he should tell his friend that he plans on getting married. It is unclear to me whether or not I would consider George and this friend close friends. It seems as if they have some everlasting connection and clearly George has an interest in keeping in touch with him, but I feel as if George always has to think before telling him something and this is not healthy. More importantly, this nameless friend damages/ruins George’s relationship with his father. As we all know, in the end George commits suicide. Although I can not definitively say George would not have committed suicide had his father not spoken with the friend, I strongly believe George would not have killed himself. I am wondering as to why George’s father cared about this friend so much? What are the positive characteristics that George’s dad saw inside this friend?

Overall, this friend caused a lot of unnecessary complexity to George’s life and eventually caused his suicide.

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Each characters in the story The Judgement can be defined as: Georg is the represented Kafka himself; Frieda Brandenfeld is mentioned as Felice Bauer, Kafka’s fiancee; and I think “the friend” in Russia whom has never given a name is the character of Kafka’s inner self. We know that Georg and his friend communicated mostly through letters. I see the letters as Kafka’s conflict to himself for being Georg or the friend (to be rich or poor and to be married or a bachelor. There are plenty of examples in the article showing his confusing thought.

It is audaciously to say Kafka has schizophrenia that he created a virtual friend as the other side of him. We can see a lot of details of Georg’s friend in first couple pages, but the friend of him has never had a name. Therefore, I think Kafka has his reasons to make the virtual character. Kafka might hope to go to St. Petersburg, Russia, but he was also afraid of losing things he had in his hometown since his friend is described as “having no ties with the local colony or his compatriots and almost no social dealings with native families, he was settling in to become a bachelor for good.”(p.58)

As I know, Kafka had been having conflict with his father in real life, so he might want to escape from the place living with his father that he said in The Judgement his friend didn’tgo back to visit even when Georg’s mother passed away. Kafka might be really yearn for the life in Russia. Somehow, Kafka knew that to abandon everything to Russia was an immature decision, he wrote: ” he(the friend) was a big child who simply had to listen to the successful friends who had remained at home.” On page 60, I see Kafka’s self conflict again. When Georg and his father’s business has grown, his friend tried to persuade Georg to move to Russia instead of congratulated him. And then Kafka was struggling again: “Georg always limited himself to writing to his friend about trivial occurrences.”

On p.61, it mostly described Kafka’s dilemma of his marriage. “Well, we are both at fault; but I would not have it any other way now.” can be analyzed Kafka felt regret to his engagement.The words Georg told himself was so complex that he said “That is how I’m, and that is how he must take me,” and “I cannot tailor myself into a person who might be more suitable for a friendship with him that I am.” I would read that as Kafka was persuading and reminding himself that he had to get marry with his fiancee and to forget the life he had been yearning for in Russia.

We could see as many conflicts as I mentioned above inside Kafka’s heart through only first few pages. Kafka might have schizophrenia like as I said because he kept fighting to himself to make choice in his life expressing through his writings. He writes in profundity and philosophically that I just tried my best to guess, but I believe there will never be an answer for the explanation of his writings.

In the story The Judgement by Franz Kafka, the role of the friend in St.Petersburg is to emphasize the lifestyle of Georg. If the story did not include the friend, Georg’s lifestyle may seem normal to an average person. The friend can be a character that is easy to compare with Georg.The friend in St.Petersburg remains mostly a mystery to the reader because of the constant indefinite adjectives to describe the friend. He is pictured as a man with “a fully exotic beard poorly concealing the face” and to be a “big child” (57 and 58). The friend remains as a blur to the readers because he is never one adjective. He mingles between two words that contradicts each other and remains there. However, Georg draws a line between who he is and who he is not. He tells himself “That is how I am, and that is how he must take me, I cannot tailor myself into a person who might be more suitable for a friendship with him than I am” (61).
Georg and his friend can be also seen as complete opposites. Georg is successful, but his friend has “fled” to Russia and hasn’t been as successful as Georg. Georg can be seen as having a social life compared to his friend who has “no real ties with the local colony of his compatriots and almost no social dealings with native families” (58). Georg was about to get married and his friend was seen as a “bachelor for good” (58).
Georg’s success, his friendships and his marriage all seem normal and definite whereas his friend lives in a blurry world. By comparing Georg and his friend side by side, Georg’s characteristics are shown better.

Kafka’s story, “The Judgment” describes the relationship between the characters Georg and the Friend. Although we don’t get a define description of the Friend we can tell that him and Georg were once close through their letter conversations. I believe that Kafka created these two characters to represent how he himself, is torn between being the man Georg or being the Friend.

Georg seems to be a man who is successful, good looking and ready to be wed. Someone who has decided his life is good and wants to settle down and have kids to do the same thing. The Friend however, is the opposite. The Friend is a bachelor, tries hard to be successful and moves to Russia to be alone. I can say he wants to be alone because in the story the Friend describes how he does not have ties with anyone in Russia. The Friend says he moves to Russia because his business wasn’t doing well. At the same time it sounds like he’s doing worse in Russia but also sounds content. There was a letter the Friend sent that asked Georg to move to Russia with him and Georg replied back saying he is fine where he is. I believe this signifies how the two egos of Kafka can’t come together. They are always separate but still a part of each other.

Georg tends to hide things about his life from the Friend because he does not want his friend to envy him. However, Georg also wants to keep this image of himself before his friend left for the Friend. To me it feels like Georg wants to be accepted by the Friend which goes back to the point that they can not be separated. Georg pities the Friend but at the same time he won’t tell him to come home. Even though he tells the Friend he is getting married he doesn’t invite the Friend to the wedding. This insults the wife, Frieda, and Georg says that is how it must be.

There is a strong sense of separation between the characters but at the same time they are not separated. This is why I believe Georg and the Friend are Kafka’s way of telling the reader that they are the same person. That Georg and the Friend are himself. Georg is the man he wants to be however the Friend is there as well.

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 .