ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up Franz Kafka’s “The Judgment” (1912), a narrative that has aroused heated critical debates since its publication. Although critics have approached the narrative from various perspectives, they unanimously agree that the dynamics of the narrative reside in the conflict between the father and the son, a consensus backed up by Kafka’s own words in his letter and diary. Thus, we are only able to see the son as being victimized by the father or vice versa. Behind the plot development, however, there exists a covert progression centering on the conflict between individual and society, an undercurrent where both father and son, among other characters, are in the same boat as victims of social pressure.
