In this sense, Georg Bendemann, like other heroes of Kafka's stories, reflects the author's most basic personal problem - that of bachelorhood. Kafka's curse of being able to write only in seclusion is the seamy side of his devotion to writing as life's only reward. Better than most of his stories, 'The judgment' reflects Kafka's haunted mind, which, taking perfection and intensity of experience as its goal, races through the plot.

Leaving so much unsaid which, Kafka felt, eluded his grasp as a writer, this style excites the reader's imagination and consistently drives him to question and comment. It is the realization of his impotence in the face of an Absolute that accounts for his terse and fragmentary, yet immensely dynamic, style - which is more noticeable in 'The judgment' than in most of his other works. Kafka regarded art as 'a form of prayer,' wanted to have nothing to do with writing for aesthetic reasons, and continuously suffered from the realization that he could not ever close the gap between what he heard inside himself and what he actually wrote. More than once, Max Brod wrote that Kafka was steeped in a trance during the autumn of 1912. The story's most paramount theme, that of Georg's bachelorhood, has its origin in Kafka's complex relationships with his fiancée and his father, but also in his perfectionist notions of what writing should be. From then on, Kafka never really stopped incriminating himself because of, his feeling that if he were married to Felice, he would betray his art. Immediately after meeting Felice, he wrote that he was 'doomed,' and sometime after finishing 'The judgment,' he remarked that he was indirectly indebted to Felice for the story, but also that Georg dies because of Frieda. Georg Bendemann's judgment at the hand of his father is as inexorable as was that of Franz Kafka at the hand of Felice, who was to create a dilemma between his ideal of bachelorhood - to him, the necessary prerequisite for his writing - and that of a happy family life. Second, 'The judgment' is partly the result of Kafka's fateful meeting with Felice Bauer (later, his fiancée) in the home of his friend Max Brod, six weeks before the story's composition (see Life and Background). This is not surprising for a highly introverted writer like Kafka, but it does illustrate the enormous inner pressure under which he must have written 'The judgment.' In this connection, it should also be remembered that he completed the story in one sitting, during a single night he 'carried his own weight on his back more than once that night,' he said, commenting that one can really write only in this manner, 'completely open spiritually and physically.' Indeed, everything Kafka wrote before 'The judgment' seems unfinished by comparison. When he re-read the story, for instance, he noted that only he could penetrate to the core of the story which, much like a newborn child, 'was covered with dirt and mucus as it came out of him' he also commented in his diary that he wanted to write down all possible relationships within the story that were not clear to him when he originally wrote it. First, there are Kafka's own commentaries and entries in his diary.

There are two reasons why 'The judgment' is considered the most autobiographical of Kafka's stories.

Franz kafka quotes about isolation