Interpretation
Criticisms of Kafka’s short story range from simple parallelism between the lives of Georg and Kafka to more complex views concerning the notion of judgement itself. Heinz Politzer, for example, views the story as a means through which Kafka explored his thoughts about his romance with Felice Bauer, citing as evidence the impending marriages Georg and Kafka held in common. He argues that the severed relationship between Georg and his friend represented the bachelorhood Georg, and therefore Kafka, would soon have to give up.
Herbert Tauber, on the other hand, viewed the story as a commentary on the conflict between two separate worlds, shown through the conflict between father and son. The world of the son is a world of “vital existence in which probability and reservation rule” and that of the father is a world, “in which every step has an incalculable importance because it is taken under the horizon of an absolute summons to the road”.
Meanwhile, Russel Berman sees the story as a discourse on the nature of judgment in general, recognizing its depiction in the story as weak and illogical, yet simultaneously necessary. He also bemoans such a state of society as was suggested in the story that would foster degraded forms of writing and, more hauntingly, nurture extreme willingness to conform to orders without concern for consequences.
Berman additionally points out that Georg’s need to rationalize why he does not want to invite his estranged friend to his wedding is a result of concerns he has pushed out of sight, but nevertheless still holds. He points out that Kafka shares the methodology of exploring the human psyche by analyzing the motivations behind actions and thoughts with the famed thinkers Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.
In the story, the exiled friend in Russia exerts considerable power over the other characters—Georg, his father, and his fiancée, Frieda. In his diaries, Kafka wrote that the friend is the strongest connection between Georg and his father, for it is through this link that his father is able to reassert himself as paterfamilias and his son's enemy and that Georg is able to submissively accept him as such. Kafka goes on to relate that the fiancée exists, in a tangential sense, only because of the father-son bond that the absent exile creates.
In still another interpretation, Georg is actually the narrator with 1st person being his self-rationalized view of himself (as if a continent away and tied to family and hopeless for the future). The father, or 2nd self, is society-rationalized view. The father shows what is acceptable versus what is wanted by 1st self. It is the proverbial angel on the shoulder arguing with the devil on the other shoulder. The host is stuck in Russia, visits less frequently and leaves the inner monologues 'back at home.'
Read more about this topic: The Judgment