“Truly, but even more truly”: Kafka and Cognitive Metaphor

Applying cognitive metaphor theory to a reading of Franz Kafka's first great story “The Judgment” fills a lacuna in the long tradition of scholarship on the role of metaphor in Kafka's work. Cognitive analysis of the text reveals a liberal and effective use of everyday basic linguistic metaphor on the part of the narrator alongside a striking discrepancy in metaphorical facility between the story's two protagonists, findings with important implications. Further, each critical juncture of the narrative — the turning point, the climax, and the denouement — foregrounds metaphor in unique and fascinating ways. In light of the text's genesis — composed over the course of eight hours one night in September 1912 — these findings indicate, contra received wisdom that the author had an “aversion” to metaphor, an intuitive appreciation of the power and truth of metaphor as elucidated by contemporary cognitive science.