Franz Kafka is an iconic writer of 20th-century literature, whose life and work have profoundly influenced modern literature by exploring the absurdity and alienation of human existence.
Throughout his short and long life, Franz Kafka was an eternal stranger, moving back and forth between two countries (Czechoslovakia and Austria), unable to find his own identity and never settling down in either country. His life is so similar to my own life of belonging to nowhere that I can’t help but be drawn to it.
To put Kafka’s major works into context, a German dictionary introduces him as follows
“In his works, Kafka often pits the patriarchal and authoritarian figure of the father against the abstract and authoritative figure of the state, which the powerless individual can never attack.”
His work “The Metamorphosis” was first published in 1915. It garnered so much attention that it can be considered the beginning of modern literature, and has become a staple of the literary canon.
The protagonist wakes up one morning to find himself turned into a bug and is no longer able to earn money for his family. From that moment on, he’ll be dependent on his family for his livelihood. In short, he becomes an ugly bug, hated by people and considered a nuisance, and in the end, he chooses to starve to death rather than feed himself. Strangely enough, Gregor the Beetle doesn’t deny his existence as an insect, nor does he try to free himself.
In 1916, a writer named Karl Brandt wrote a follow-up to “The Metamorphosis” and published it in a Prague newspaper, and he resurrected Gregor the Beetle as a human again, which made Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” even more famous.
In Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the consciousness of the protagonist, Gregor the dragonfly, never changes whether he is a human or a bug. The consciousness he had as a human remains unchanged until his death.
In this work, the reader is confronted with the dual situation of Gregor Zaman, one of which is that his consciousness as a bug in body and a traveling salesman in mind continues to be prolonged, and the other is that he expresses a consciousness that dreams of “change” because he is tired of living the same life day after day.
In this sense, the novel cannot be seen as a pathological representation of human consciousness splitting into devil and angel like “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” but it can be said that it reveals a side of psychopathology through a human being turned into a bug.
Gregor Zamja eventually realizes that his family can survive without him working to support them, and that his life as a bug is not helpful to them, but rather a burden. As a result, he realizes that his existence has no value, and in despair over his loneliness and alienation, he chooses to die.
Not only is Gregor’s role as a “tool” to earn money for his family detailed throughout the novel, but Gregor himself often complains about the “irregular life, poor quality food, and short-lived relationships” he experiences whenever he travels on business.
It’s worth noting that Kafka had a friend named Max Brod, through whom his manuscripts saw the light of day. Prof. Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch’s book “Max Brod im Kampf um das Judentum” describes their relationship and includes some of the letters they exchanged.
When Kafka died, he asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his manuscripts, but Max Brod did not fulfill his wishes, and Kafka’s manuscripts traveled around the world during the First and Second World Wars. Max Brott, who was Jewish, was hunted down by the Nazis, but he took Kafka’s manuscript with him.
Kafka’s manuscripts were miraculously rescued and traveled through various countries, including Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Denmark, and Israel, and were eventually stored in a secret vault in Switzerland for many years. After the war, they were published in their entirety by the 100-year-old S. Fisher publishing house, run by a Jewish publisher based in Frankfurt, Germany. Today, if you visit Prague, you can still see the houses where Kafka lived at the time, and the streets and houses that served as the setting for his works.
