The Judgment

[u/Opening-Scarcity2964]

​I just finished reading it and, honestly, I’m totally baffled. Did the friend in St. Petersburg actually exist, or was he just made up?

​What hit me the most was definitely the final line—when Georg jumps off the bridge, there’s a ton of people around, and no one even reacts. But the whole thing with the friend is a complete mystery to me.

[u/thowawaymypants]

The friend exists. The father has been corresponding with him behind the son's back. The father questions the friend's existence at first, before telling of their correspondence, so as to imply that the son has not kept up his own correspondence, such as not telling the friend of his engagement, treating the friend as though he does not really exist.

The father is aging and the son is attempting to mature into his own man, managing more their shared business and getting married. The father feels the son is trying to "cover him up," to take away his livelihood and potency, retiring him to an irrelevant position in the world in his old age. The father thus attempts to assert his potency over the son by managing such as his relations with his friend behind his back, telling the friend about the engagement before he can, even saying regarding his fiance, "I’ll sweep her right from your side."

The overbearing father has then seemingly taken over the son's life and reduced him to irrelevancy, to unimportance, to an effective nonexistence in his own personal and business relationships, which is the of "the judgment" by which the father "sentences" the son to death by drowning. The son feels determined in his sense of the self by the father's opinion as would a small child, and so the judgment of the father compels him to drown himself as the father suggests, the father unwilling to allow the son to develop his own agency as the father feels it competes with his own.

What to make of the "unending stream of traffic was going over the bridge"? Well, the son only lets go of the railings to plunge into the water once he has "caught sight of a motor coach which would easily drown out the noise of his fall." So seemingly no one reacts because, as the son intends, no one notices his drowning. The son passes out of the world without note, as though the interloping of the father in his affairs made it so he never existed to the rest of the society represented by the people going on in their own affairs as they pass him by across the bridge.

[u/Opening-Scarcity2964 → u/thowawaymypants]

Makes so much more sense now :) Thanks! I actually thought the friend was real from the very beginning, but that conversation with the father left me a bit confused. That ending hit me really hard though. Cheers!

[u/Vivid_Image4762 → u/thowawaymypants]

The friend does not exist. Kafka says so himself in his journal.
The friend is just a metaphor for the relationship between Georg and his father, more precisely between Georg’s true inner self and the one that his father wanted him to have or to become. The ‘fight’ between this two ideas ‘comes to life’ in the image of the friend, as an external link.
I recommend reading Kafka’s journal for more insights into the meaning of his works, as he often writes about them there :)

[u/MaiBalz → u/Vivid_Image4762]

Have you read Death of the Author by Roland Barthes?

[u/Opening-Scarcity2964 → u/Vivid_Image4762]

Jeżeli przyjaciel jest metafora relacji, to czego metafora są listy? Hm. Powiem szczerze bardziej do mnie przemawia interpretacja, że przyjaciel istnieje.

[u/thowawaymypants → u/Vivid_Image4762]

I have read Kafka's diaries, and nowhere in them does he say that the friend does not exist. In fact, he talks about the friend as existing. Pasted below, from the entry written 2/11/13:

"The friend is the link between father and son, he is their strongest common bond. Sitting alone at his window, Georg rummages voluptuously in this consciousness of what they have in common, behaves he has his father within him, and would be at peace with everything if it were not for a fleeting, sad thoughtfulness In the course of the story the father, with the strengthened position that the other, lesser things they share in common give him—love, devotion to the mother, loyalty to her memory, the clientele that he (the father) had been the first to acquire for the business—uses the common bond of the friend to set himself up as Georg’s antagonist. Georg is left with nothing; the bride, who lives in the story only in relation to the friend, that is, to what father and son have in common, is easily driven away by the father since no marriage has yet taken place, and so ^he cannot penetrate the circle of blood relationship that is drawn around father and son. What they have in common is built up entirely around the father, Georg can feel it only as something foreign, something that has become independent that he has never given enough protection, that is exposed to Russian revolutions, and only because he himself has lost everything except his awareness of the father, does the judgment, which closes off his father from him completely, have so strong an effect on him."

It is not as if the author has final say over happens in a story or what it means, so much as provides another lens through which a critic may read it (as u/MaiBalz implies). You shouldn't need an author's diary to interpret what happens in a story, and you should cite your sources when making interpretive claims, or at least double-check the source to see if your claim is actually true.

[u/Maximum_Rough8062]

I wrote an interpretation of it that got published. If you're interested I can send it to you (I'm a good writer). I think it will make much more sense to you then!