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In Kafka’s story, “The Judgment”, once can determine the one who judges and the one who is judged by investigating the text on the basis of psychoanalysis and deconstruction.
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Georg has been running his father’s business, and he is successful. He undresses his father, prepares his bed, it’s like he nurses him. Georg assumes a parental role. He assumes that he became the authority – over his father – and he treats his father as the son, the one in need of help. Georg imitates the role of his father. However, towards the end of the story, his father reacts against Georg, accuses him for betraying his friend and disgracing the memory of his mother, sentences him to death. Afterwards, Georg commits suicide. Freudian psychoanalysis would suggest that the father figure in the story may be representing the super-ego of Georg; in fact, it was Georg’s super-ego that sentenced him to death.

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Additionally, in the story the father talks about Georg’s friend as follows: “He would have been a son after my own heart”. Father prefers Georg’s double to be his son because he cannot challenge his authority, as he is the weaker one. Georg’s friend is the powerless double of Georg, possessing all the weak, negative attributes unlike Georg. Besides, Georg’s father states that “the death of our dear mother hit me harder than it did you”. In Freudian sense, for Georg, Frieda Brandenfeld was a substitute for his mother, as a sexual object. On the other hand, father had no sexual substitutions like Georg’s, so the rivalry between Georg and his father heightened. We can also say that Georg, by finding a sexual object, had successfully ended up his mourning of his mother, while the father still faces struggle, and is mourning.
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Georg commits suicide due to the order of his super ego, which usually orders irrational, unexplainable actions in the psyche. Since Georg projects the image of his father to his own psyche as the super ego, he obeys to the order of his father. Moreover, one can also suggest that Georg has moved out of the Lacanian symbolic order and passed into Lacanian Real; hence he committed suicide.
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On the other hand, in the context of “literary blindness” once can suggest that Georg’s death symbolizes “the death of the author”. Until the end of the story, Georg is a powerful figure; he has a double in Russia who represents one side of Georg’s self which consists of all negative attributes that Georg wishes to get rid of. Secondly, he is superior to his father in terms of physical strength and wealth. He narrates his friend’s story to his father who represents the “self-forgetful reader”. However, his father’s awakening – his remembering – causes Georg’s death eventually. At this point, Georg’s father – as the reader – becomes not the one “who knows how to read” (Blanchot) but he becomes the “creative reader” by intervening, taking part in the events – the text -. Georg’s father eliminates Georg – the author – and fulfils the text. The author who supposes himself as the most powerful, all-knowing figure dies; as the reader – who is assumed to be just seer, watcher of the text – becomes the prominent contributing figure to the literary text. All in all, Kafka’s story represents “the death of the author” (Barthes) on one hand, and “the birth of the reader” on the other.
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In this kind of deconstructionist reading of the text, one can suggest that the one who judges is the reader while the author is the one who is judged. By judging and sentencing the author to death, the reader assumes a prominent role in the fulfilment of the text.
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