On The Metamorphosis - Research Paper Example

The Metamorphosis The Metamorphosis is a novella written by Franz Kafka and published in 1915. The Metamorphosis is one of theclassical works of fiction of the 20th century, and has been studied in colleges and universities beyond the western world. The novella recounts a story of a salesman by name Gregor Samsa, who is surprised on waking up and realizing that he has been transformed into an insect like creature. This story was written at the times of high tensions of the World War II where the Nazi Germans were executing Jews.

To Kafka, this was a time of hopelessness and alienation as represented by the unexpected transformation of Gregor Samsa into an insect. Like many of his greatest works of fiction, this is a dramatization of alienation that existed at the character’s being; a state of otherness that produced unending sense of guilt (Neil 673). Franz Kafka was born on July 1883 into a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family with Hermann and Julie Kafka as his father and mother respectively. His father was a middle-class business man, who had set up a dry goods store while his mother came from a well off family.

Kafka’s family was poor, and this situation forced him to move to Prague to salvage his situation. His father was viewed as a selfish and overbearing businessman, but Kafka described him as; enduring, world dominating, healthy, appetitive, and a man with knowledge of human nature (Begley 14). Since his mother was busy managing her husband’s business, she was always away from her children and Kafka and siblings were brought up by a series of governesses and servants. Kafka and his father had a troubled relationship because of his father’s authoritarian and demanding character.

Kafka witnessed the World War II, when the Nazi German took his sisters and their families to the Lodz Ghetto from where they supposedly died (Begley 14). Kafka was a socialist and he is reported to wear a red carnation to school for his confession of socialism in addition to attending meetings of the Klub Miladych (Frank 1). Kafka’s religious upbringing was weak because his father took his to synagogue four times a year, and this did not have a lot of influence on his life. On growing up, he was associated with Zionism and Judaism although these were not explicit in his works owing to his deliberate sense of cosmopolitanism (Lothar 191).

Kafka’s The Metamorphosis pictures his divided consciousness and modernist ideology. The depiction of his fragmented consciousness can be traced in his own experience with his father’s authoritarian and manipulative life; not to mention his ambivalent cultural identity as a German-speaking Jew in the hostile Czech nationalist environment of Prague (Neil 673). With his work relating to his life experiences, modernism would have it that experience is not different from reality. Therefore, the ‘Bugness’ of Gregor’s life is used as a red herring in Kafka’s story of life experiences.

Kafka wrote multivalent literary works, which gives his critics a myriad interpretation under different schools (Neil 674). Existentialism is evident in his works due to their nature of expressing hopelessness and absurdity. Absurdity is set from the first line when Gregor wake up and discovers that he has turned into a giant insect, which is in reality impossible to happen. The Metamorphosis remains one of the most analyzed literary works, and inspires diverse as well as mutually exclusive interpretations.

Therefore, critics received it as an enigmatic work of literary imagination and they have always praised it for its powerful symbolic representation of alienation brought out by a literalized metaphor of man as an insect-like creature. Kafka himself wrote a letter to his fiancee Bauer expressing his dissatisfaction of the ending of The Metamorphosis. He termed the ending flawed due to a business trip, which he made just before he wrote its last part. The theme in The Metamorphosis has been an interest of criticism especially its inclination on realism and not the fantastic occurrence in the story.

This makes the work to fit in the modernism era because of its venture into the new world (Perez-Alvarez 186). In the metamorphosis, Kafka explores modernism in various ways just like other cultural and artistic works at the beginning of 20th century. Critics have identified the themes of the 20th century in the novella as; absurdity of life, the dualism in mind and body, the limits of sympathy, and alienation. Many critics have given it a psychoanalytical interpretation as a dramatization of modern neuroses (Perez-Alvarez 186).

The story is strewn with a wild experimentation and a stream of consciousness and individualism. Critics viewed Kafka as having introduced a new dimension of telling a story away from the conventional style. Works Cited Begley, Louis. The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay. New York: Atlas & Co., 2008. Print. Frank, Michael. "A City Re-imagined: The Metamorphosis of Kafka and His Context." New York Times: E.2:33. New York Times. 16 Aug. 2002. 9 April, 2012. . Lothar, Kahn.

Between Two Worlds: a cultural history of German-Jewish writers. Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1993. Print. Neil, Patrick M. Great world writers: twentieth century. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2004. Print. Perez-Alvarez, Marino. "The Schizoid Personality of Our Time". International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy 3.2 (2003): 181–194.