English Teacher

Reading Kafka was a new experience for me, and one that was filled with complexities. I found Kafka’s writing to be inordinately absurd and confusing. Yet, the critical description I give to Kafka’s style and sequence is similar to the way I can describe some dreams. As I was reading through the stories, I couldn’t help but feel like I was reading dreams. I also began apply our three dream theorists to the text immediately, but because the connection was strong,I really became attached to Jung.
In “Children on a Country Road,” I was fascinated by the transgression from a dominant “I” to the “we” in the short story. I observed that the “I” in the story blends very distinctly with other children. The statements become permeated with “we,” and also begin to contain the general statements like, “turning on one’s right side,” and “how one might stretch oneself out” (Kafka 23). Such shifts in point of view display the blending of the main speaker among the other characters. This would support Jung’s idea of interpretation at the subjective level, where all the characters are the dreamer.
I also found this subjectivity in “The Judgment.” The speaker, Georg Bendemann, talks extremely poorly about his friend abroad. He refers to his friend as “a man one could be sorry for but could not help” because he was “wearing himself out in a foreign country” (49,50). Bendemann equivocates between sharing news to him for fear that he would make his friend jealous of his success. This is interesting because we can apply the same subjectivity perception to suggest that in the dream, the dreamer (Bendemann) would also be his friend. In this case, the dreamer has hidden feelings of being isolated, alienated, and being a failure. He may also be jealous of others’ successes, since he feels that his old comrade would envy him, and be discontented about his own situation.
In addition, “The Judgment” also has hints of the imago. I closely associate Bendemann as his father, to the point where they are imagos of each other. They become one with each other, by saying “our mothers death” but which is culminated in the act of Bedemann carrying his father to bed. I found this moment to be where the son becomes the father, and the father is the son. This, too, was oddly Oedipal. This is true since the father has been watching all of his son’s moves for a long time, to watch that he is not undermined. Yet in a sense, the son is in fact trying to kill his father, since he metaphorically kills him when he covers him up in bed. This could be a wish fulfillment. It was also interesting that the father says “Ill sweep her (the bride) from your very side, you don’t know how (61).