This is the thematic significance of The Sons: the story of children whose parents attempt to “raise” them into adults yet, at the same time, “drag” them back to the “old days” of childhood dependence. Both in his literary and his personal writings, Kafka is a harsh critic of what he saw as the contradictory pedagogy of his period. As Gerhard Neumann has pointed out, this pedagogy (which goes back to the Enlightenment precept of compulsory education as a basis for individual freedom, or what the Germans call Erziehung zur Freiheit) presents the child with an impossible dilemma:

The demand for action, which issues from the father in the form of educational maxims, is inherently contradictory and brings about the child’s total disorientation: “Emancipate yourselves by following my example and become grown-ups” runs the one maxim: “yield through gratitude and remain children” runs the opposite one. The educational discourse coagulates into an order which cannot be obeyed: “I order you not to be so obedient!” (Das Urteil. Text, Materialien, Kommentar. Munich, 1981)

“The Judgment” provides a dramatic example of this dilemma. Georg Bendemann has been a model son, caring for his aging father and running the family business. His impending marriage will complete the generational shift from father to son, allowing him to continue the family name by starting a family of his own. But instead of letting his son replace him, Herr Bendemann rebels, reclaims his paternal authority, and reproaches his son for his “devilish” intentions. The almost-adult Georg is driven back into the submissiveness of childhood, finally flinging himself from the bridge into death “like the accomplished gymnast he had been in his youth, to his parents’ pride.”

“The Metamorphosis” and “The Stoker” also depict the impossibility of becoming an adult. As a grown-up traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa is still the perfect son, living at home, paying off the family’s debts, sacrificing himself in unacknowledged devotion to his dependent parents and sister. Whether self-willed or not, his metamorphosis turns the tables, reversing the parasitic relationship in his favor and forcing his family to find work and support his leisure. Like the early grotesque drawings of Alfred Kubin, a Prague contemporary and acquaintance whose work meant much to Kafka, Gregor’s monstrous form is meant to scandalize and disempower the conformist, petty bourgeois world around him, represented not only by the Samsas and the chief clerk, but especially by the three uncannily indentical boarders. In the quiet second movement of the story, Gregor’s attempt at self-liberation and self-definition acquires some reality: the memory of his prior human enslavement recedes into the distance, his body grows lighter and freer, he hangs from the ceiling in “blissful absorption” while a gentle, musical vibration—the harmony of existence before the Fall—rocks him back and forth. But of course the metamorphosis also increases his childlike dependence and vulnerability: the model son transformed into a happy bug simply becomes the outcast son, is bombarded with apples by the father, and in the end is literally thrown out of the house by the cleaning woman.

In “The Stoker” Karl Rossmann has also been banished from the family, but fails to take any positive steps toward adulthood. The ship’s stoker, a childlike, inarticulate but physically massive figure whose relation to Karl is animated by a strong homoerotic undercurrent, seems to represent a kind of anti-father, at once victim and protector. But Karl’s family returns in the guise of his Uncle Jacob, a wealthy and powerful senator who puts a quick end to the relationship with the stoker. The uncle promises protection, but (as we know from subsequent chapters in the novel) Karl will be repeatedly cast out of any secure, stable environment where he might settle, establish roots, and raise a family. In Kafka’s vision, in fact, America becomes a largely uninterrupted landscape of homeless and dispossessed persons, ersatz families forming and dissolving in an endless and futile process.

And yet, and yet—Kafka’s account of the sons’ destruction within the modern family sounds an unmistakable note of triumph. However terrible the content of these stories, their form remains sublimely self-assured, even jubilant. This discrepancy arises from Kafka’s own ambiguous relation—both indentification and repudiation—to the protagonists of his fictions. Like Georg Bendemann, Gregor Samsa, and Karl Rossmann (whose names are all coded versions of his own), Kafka is still a son living at home, exposed to the whim and caprice of his family. Yet in writing down their stories of suicide, grotesque metamorphosis, and banishment to America, Kafka rises above their fate, can control it with the sovereign hand of the author, can dispose of their lives like an almighty father.

As author, Kafka is the father of his literary protagonists. Thus the moment in which he writes the final sentence of “The Judgment” in his diary—the sentence narrating Georg’s death—signals his own birth as a writer. Kafka told his friend Max Brod that the story’s final image of “traffic” (Verkehr, a word with sexual connotations) streaming across the bridge had reminded him of a “giant orgasm.” Similarly, in his diary entry for February 11, 1913, he notes that the story came out of him “like a real birth, covered with filth and slime.” In this sense The Sons are Kafka’s literary offspring, his children, as he frequently points out to Felice. “Today I am sending you ‘The Stoker,’ ” he writes in June 1913 when the story was first published. “Receive the little lad kindly, sit him down beside you and praise him, as he longs for you to do.”

Kafka clearly understood these stories as part of his own effort to liberate himself from his parents’ grip. Marriage to Felice was part of his plan, but more important, indeed vital to the possibility of marriage, was his own literary paternity. Every finished story (every fictional death) marked his growing independence and literary adulthood, and brought him closer to his future fiancée. Without The Sons, he once confided to Felice, he would never have dared to approach her with the idea of marriage.