Kafka - Metamorphsis

4. In what ways do stories like �The Judgement’ and �Metamorphosis’ suggest Kafka’s fraught relationship to social and particularly paternal authority? How might this relationship be thought of as typically �modern’?

As a child and as a young man, Franz Kafka had a particularly difficult relationship with his father. For Kafka, this adversely affected the way he related to paternal authority throughout the rest of his life, and this fraught relationship with figures of paternal authority is evident in much of his writing. In particular, stories like �The Judgement’ and �Metamorphosis’ illustrate this difficult relationship, both in the themes that run throughout the stories and in the open depiction of the father working against the son. This troubled relationship with his father and his resulting struggle with paternal authority figures is also evident in the biographical �Letter to His Father’, written by Kafka in 1919. In this letter Kafka struggles to come to terms with his fractured relationship with his father, and ultimately winds up depicting his father as a ruthless tyrant, while depicting himself as suffering from some kind of persecution complex. This is a depiction of the nature of Kafka’s own troubled relationship with his father, which is indicative of the fact that Kafka did indeed have a fraught relationship with paternal authority. This fraught relationship and its manifestation within his writing is a fundamentally modern aspect of Kafka’s work, as the breakdown of the more traditional family dynamic a development caused by the onset of modernity, and the way in which Kafka explicitly and painfully deals with it by referencing his own painful relationship with his father, is fundamentally modernist. Kafka’s troubled relationship with his father also affected other areas of his life other than his writing quite significantly, but this in ultimately in turn manifested within his writing itself.

There is no doubt that Kafka’s difficult relationship with his father dramatically altered the path which his life would take. As John Hibberd notes, �Kafka saw almost all his actions as an attempt to prove his own worth or to free himself from him. Only a couple of years before his death in 1924 he was to write in his diary that as a child he had been defeated by his father, and ever since had been driven by ambition to continue the battle and to suffer perpetual defeats.’ This insight demonstrates just how important Kafka’s relationship with his father was in his life, and as such how important it was in his writing. The problematic relationship between Kafka and his father seemed to emerge due to their complete lack of understanding of each other, as Hibberd again explains. �He had little understanding of his son’s sensitivity and intended to bring him up harshly to equip him for a harsh world.’ Although this lack of understanding was reciprocated by Kafka, as Hibberd demonstrates when he notes that Hermann Kafka’s �parental edicts’ were often completely �incomprehensible to the son’ , it was Kafka who suffered most as a result. Not only was Kafka intimidated by the harsh nature of his father, but Kafka always saw the physical size and bulk of his father, when compared to his own sickly thinness, as a reminder of his father’s power and authority over him. This was exacerbated by the occasions on which Kafka went swimming with his father and his feelings of humiliation and sense of inferiority at times such as these are captured in �Letter to his Father.’ �I was after all, depressed even by your mere physical presence. I remember for instance, how often we undressed together in the same bathing-hut. There was I, skinny, weakly, slight, you strong, tall, broad. Even inside the hut I felt myself a miserable specimen’. Moments such as these would ultimately scar Kafka, as he felt that even his physical bearing prevented him from ever gaining his father’s approval. It was also Kafka’s father’s stinging criticisms of everything he ever did that him feel as though his father �rejected his otherness’ , and as such, rejected him. It was this rejection from his father which led to the creation of Kafka’s fraught relationship to social and paternal authority, and which created feelings of insecurity and inferiority which would stay with Kafka his entire life.

Although this troubled relationship with paternal authority and the accompanying feelings of insecurity and inferiority are clearly evident in �Metamorphosis’, the story in which it is most prevalent is �The Judgement.’ The story opens with Georg Bendemann, who has just finished writing a letter to his friend informing him of his engagement, and who is sitting back and relaxing, contemplating the contents of his letter. Upon finishing his momentary reflection Georg rises, and though it occurs to him that there is no particular need for him to do so, he goes and visits his father in his room. �At last he put his letter in his pocket and went out of his room across a little passage-way into his father’s room, which he had not entered for months. There was indeed no call for him to go there in the course of normal events’. The first thing Georg notices when he enters his father’s room, is the darkness in which is father has been dwelling. When this darkness in which we came across the father is juxtaposed next to the relative brightness in which we found Georg, who was sitting next to a window on a bright Sunday morning in the comfort of his study, the implication is clear. It appears as though Georg’s father is slowly moving out of life, whereas Georg is seen as beginning to come into the fullness of his own. Not only is this typified by the brightness in which we found Georg when compared to the darkness in which we find his father, it is also seen in the way in which Georg is anticipating his future marriage, whereas his father is left lamenting Georg’s dead mother. �Georg was amazed to find how dark his father’s room was even on this sunny morning. What a shadow that high wall cast, rising up on the far side of the narrow courtyard. His father was sitting by the window, in a corner decked out with mementos of Georg’s lamented mother’. The difference between the two here is clear.

Whereas Georg was sitting by the window in brightness anticipating his coming marriage, his father is sitting by the window in darkness,

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