A capsule version of Kafka's themes

Franz Kafka's story "The Judgement," though not as well-known as Metamorphosis, The Hunger Artist, or In the Penal Colony (all great) is a capsule version of all of Kafka's major themes, which may be why the Philip Rahv edited Modern Library Kafka story collection begins with it: the story starts of totally conventionally, a young man sits down to draft a letter to a friend of his who's been living abroad (in Russia) and then, without your even realizing when or how, the story becomes progressively more odd and disturbing: the friend in Russia has been away for many years and is a social isolate, the man writing the letter declines to tell his friend abroad about his pending marriage, rather he makes up bits of small talk; the man writing the letter goes to his father to seek some advice about communicating the marriage. Uh, oh - father themes are a dominant motif in K's work - and the story becomes really odd when the son approaches the widowed dad, who's lounging in a dressing gown, in his room, where the son never ventures - dad lashes into the son, asserting the son is a weakling, the dad is the powerful one (so many Oedipal issues here - but it's not just that, it's a struggle for identity, and also a figuration of a religious struggle, young man against an Old Testament God) - father suggests the Russian friend doesn't even exist, by the end, the young man is totally diminished and hopeless. Kafka's stories, in fact all of his fiction, are about an individual helpless against a powerful and inscrutable antogonist - the father being the pre-eminent figure, but at other times the state or other authority figures. And like all of his stories, The Judgment is unsettling because it feels superficially so conventional yet its emotive contents are extreme and bizarre.