Tassilo Thomas Foster

Kafka uses his childhood experiences to give us a parable of how everything we cannot handle in ourselves continues to grow, is projected into the outside world, gradually eludes our control, and eventually turns against us. In other words, the death sentence is the result of Georg's father fixation, the real cause of his overriding sense of guilt. It is not that Georg is innocent and does not deserve punishment for his inactivity; it is the exclusiveness with which he keeps staring at his father that draws him into the whirlpool of self-annihilation.