In 1914 the young Expressionist poet Walter Hasenclever, without any knowledge of Kafka’s project, offered Kurt Wolff a play entitled The Son, which Wolff published in Die Weissen Blätter, the same literary journal in which he would print “The Metamorphosis” a year later. Banned during the war for its “anarchic” assault on patriarchal authority, Hasenclever’s play became a rallying point for the young writers of his generation.

Yet Kafka’s title strangely underscores the juvenile, dependent nature of his protagonists. Unlike Freud’s narratives of Vatermord, these stories are about the banishment and death of children. And unlike the heroes of Expressionist scenarios, Kafka’s literary progeny refuse to take up arms against their fathers. His sons accept their bizarre fate—they die or are banished without polemical fanfare, without resentment for their persecutors, and apparently without regret. Thus the oddest (and funniest) feature of “The Metamorphosis” is not Gregor’s transformation into a monstrous vermin but his straight-faced acceptance of his fate. He never once reflects on the possible cause of his transformation or how he might reverse it, and just before death, while lost in a state of “empty and peaceful meditation,” he thinks of his family “with tenderness and love.” Karl Rossmann in “The Stoker” also remembers his parents fondly although, as his uncle remarks, they shipped him off to America after he had been molested by a family servant, “just as you throw a cat out of the house when it annoys you.” Georg Bendemann in “The Judgment” is the most astonishingly obedient son of all. When his father suddenly and inexplicably sentences him to death by drowning, he rushes from the room without another thought, and jumps off the nearest bridge, proclaiming his undying love for his parents as he drops into the river.

Despite its deadpan humor, this filial devotion has an extreme, even pathological quality that prevents us from reading Kafka’s stories in conventional psychological and realist terms. Whereas a traditional nineteenth-century narrative of familial conflict might have focused on the son’s emotional growth or heightened consciousness, Kafka depicts his protagonists as mentally vacant, enigmatic figures lacking in introspection and self-awareness. The sons remain sons, profoundly unaware of their past mistakes and incapable of being changed by them. Indeed, the trauma of their punishment seems to shock these semi-adults back into an emotional and intellectual state of early childhood. In “The Judgment” the shock comes midway through the story when the father stands up in bed, “radiant” with transcendent insight, while his grown son cowers in the corner like a little boy, his senses confused and his memory dulled. In “The Metamorphosis” the shock comes with the first sentence like a hammer-blow, thrusting Gregor Samsa—and the reader—into a radically new and foreign world. After his transformation Gregor leads a child’s existence, excused from his hated employment as a traveling salesman and granted the illicit pleasure of playing alone in his room, free to discover and experiment with his new-found body. If he develops at all, it is in reverse, back to a lost innocence and purity. In “The Stoker” the shock actually occurs before the story’s opening, when Karl Rossmann is “seduced” and banished to a foreign continent. But despite this initiation into adult experience—Karl is actually the father of a child—he retains his innocent naïveté and must be led about by the hand, alternately protected and abused by the grown-ups around him.

This lack of inner emotional development (or, at least, the lack of any tangible evidence of such development) makes Kafka’s “sons” extremely difficult to interpret. In the classical sense, they lack the critical self-awareness to be truly tragic. But this “lack” is an emblem of their modernity: to remain a son is also to remain this side of transcendence, completion, and unity, a fragment of the full man or traditional, realist character. At the same time this static, “frozen” quality shifts the story’s emphasis away from the realm of individual psychology and places it squarely on the social relations between characters. This claim may seem odd in light of the prevailing tendency to read Kafka as the poet of modern, individual anxiety, divorced from social or historical realities. Yet Kafka’s title The Sons defines his protagonists in terms of their families, as children still largely controlled by familial and social relations. In fact, one might say that the true subject of these stories is not the individual subject at all but the family—that social and even “animal” organism, as Kafka once called it, through which the child first learns to define its own identity.

This is the point where the “secret connection” mentioned in the letter to Wolff begins to emerge. While writing these stories, Kafka was for the first time contemplating leaving his family to marry a woman from Berlin, Felice Bauer, whom he had met in August 1912 and with whom he was conducting a clandestine correspondence. (Then twenty-nine, Kafka was still living with his parents in a room he characterized as a “connecting street” between the living room and the other bedrooms; hence his instructions to Felice to write to him at his office.) The letters and diaries from this period are filled with bitterness toward his family’s intrusion on his free time, which he wanted to devote to his writing. In early October 1912, Hermann Kafka’s insistence that his son help manage the family asbestos factory brought him to the verge of suicide. In November Kafka’s mother found a letter from Felice in one of his coat pockets and secretly enlisted her support in controlling Franz’s eating and sleeping habits. Kafka discovered the theft and, furious at this invasion of his privacy (which occurred while he was busy with “The Metamorphosis”), wrote a “wild” letter to Felice that gives us a revealing portrait of the state of his family relations:

Everything had been so good; I was looking forward to enjoying in peace the happiness you give me … when along comes my mother and wrecks it all. I have always looked upon my parents as persecutors; until about a year ago I was indifferent to them and perhaps to the world at large, as some kind of lifeless thing, but I see now it was only suppressed fear, worry, and unhappiness. All parents want to do is drag one down to them, back to the old days from which one longs to free oneself and escape; they do it out of love, of course, and that’s what makes it so horrible.

Impelled by this antagonism for what he considered the humiliating conditions of his own dependence, Kafka undertook one of the most perceptive, rigorous, and devastating analyses of the modern family that exists in literature.