“The Metamorphosis” is Franz Kafka’s masterpiece that explores the absurdity and anxiety of human existence. The metamorphosis of a human being into a grotesque insect is an in-depth look at alienation, loss of identity, and conflict with family.
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was born in Prague, Czech Republic, in 1883, the eldest son of a middle-class Jewish family. At the time of his birth, Prague was not the capital of the Czechoslovak Republic, but a city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kafka grew up in the German-speaking Jewish community of Prague.
In 1906, Kafka earned a doctorate in law, and the following year he took a job at an insurance company in Prague. However, his sole goal in life was to create literature. It wasn’t until 1909, when he published a collection of prose pieces, that Kafka made his debut as a writer.
Kafka was very reluctant to publish his work. He even left a will requesting that his unpublished works be burned. However, his friend Max Brodt collected and published Kafka’s writings, diaries, and letters, and Kafka’s name became widely known in modern literary history. After his death, “A Hunger Artist,” “The Trial,” “The Castle,” “Amerika,” and “The Great Wall of China” were published. His best-known works include The Metamorphosis, The Trial, In the Penal Colony, and A Country Doctor.
Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917, retired from his insurance job in 1922, and died at the young age of forty-one in 1924 in Kieling, a tuberculosis sanatorium near Vienna, Austria.
About the works
The Metamorphosis is a novel written by Franz Kafka and published in 1916. Kafka was a German novelist born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, who wrote at night while working as an employee of an insurance association. His writing has a fantastical tone, even as it closely describes reality. Besides The Metamorphosis, his other works include The Trial, The Castle, and A Country Doctor, all of which reflect these characteristics.
“The Metamorphosis” tells the story of a protagonist who suddenly turns into a bug in a cold and realistic style. It is considered a masterpiece that explores the absurdity and anxiety of human existence through the protagonist and the characters surrounding him. It is also considered the beginning of modern literature and has sparked numerous debates in literary history. The protagonist who turns into a bug in the novel can be seen as a symbol of our anxiety and despair, a modern person who does not know when and what kind of situation he will be in.
The Metamorphosis of Gregor Sleeping is a follow-up to The Metamorphosis, written by Carl Brandt in 1916. The Metamorphosis became more famous because it resurrected the protagonist who died after being turned into a bug.
Brief plot
One morning, Gregor Zamza, a salesman, wakes up and realizes that his body has changed strangely: he has turned into a grotesque insect with many legs. He wondered to himself, “What could have happened?” But it certainly wasn’t a dream: the boss of the company, who came to see why he was absent from work, fled in terror, his mother fainted, and his father kicked him out of his room. He was locked in his room, unable to move.
Gregor had always worked hard to support his family and loved his parents and sister dearly, but now he was hated by his family and had lost his appetite after being hit in the back with an apple thrown by his father. He became even more hated when his sister’s violin drew him out into the living room, where he was discovered by the boarders he had brought in to make a living.
Gregor gradually lost the meaning of life. His family now wished him dead. One morning, as the wounds on his back grew worse, he died quietly. His parents and sister breathed a sigh of relief and went for a picnic in the countryside to enjoy the first bright spring sunshine in a long time.
Introducing the characters
Gregor Zamza
The protagonist of the novel, he works hard as a cloth seller to support his family. One day, he suddenly turns into a bug, but his consciousness is still the same as when he was human. He understands what others say, but his own words sound like the cries of a bug. Hurt by his family’s coldness and overcome with despair, he gradually loses the will to live.
Grete
Gregor’s seventeen-year-old sister. She was an immature young girl when he was earning money, but after her transformation into a bug, she sets out to earn money. She takes care of Gregor’s needs, including cleaning his room, but grows tired of it and insists that her brother be thrown out. She plays the violin well and dreams of going to music school.
Mr. Zamza
Gregor’s father. He has no sympathy for his son, who has been turned into a bug, and is most wary of Gregor. When his son brings home money, he acts as if he is too old to work, but when the situation changes, he gets a job as a janitor and works well. Gregor’s father throws an apple at him, severely wounding him.
Mrs. Zamza
Gregor’s mother. She feels sorry for her son when he turns into a bug, but faints when she sees him. She suffers from asthma and is in poor health, so she takes in boarders and works as a dressmaker to make ends meet. Only when her son dies does she feel at peace.
The boarders
Rude and arrogant, they insist that Gregor can’t pay his rent because he’s been living in a house with bugs. They also threaten to sue him for damages. They are later evicted by Mr. Zamza.
Commentary
The motif of transformation is not so difficult to find in the history of world literature without having to teach East and West. It is also as old as humanity itself. This is because the motif of transformation can be found in traditional narratives such as myths, legends, folk tales, and fairy tales. From the Korean myth of Dangun, where a bear is reincarnated as a woman, to Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, to the digital age, transformation has always played an important role in the imagination of artists. This is undoubtedly because humans have a strong desire for change. Transformation is a literary device to fulfill this need.
Franz Kafka’s (1883-1924) middle-grade novel The Metamorphosis (1915), as the title suggests, uses metamorphosis as its central device. Of course, this work is quite different from traditional fables, which use anthropomorphized animals to satirize society, even though they are still animals. In Kafka’s work, The Metamorphosis is more philosophical and metaphysical compared to traditional metamorphoses. This is due to the fact that Kafka was a Jew, a marginalized member of Germanic society, and the fact that the time in which he was born and lived was one in which life was more threatened than at any other time in human history.
Background and content of the work
Franz Kafka wrote “The Metamorphosis” in 1912, published it in October 1915 in the Monthly, and published it in December of the same year by the Kurt Wolff publishing house. Kafka had planned to publish this work together with The Judgment and The Stoker, which he had written before writing this book, but his publisher objected and published The Metamorphosis alone. This novel is the most widely recognized of all Kafka’s works.
Kafka began writing it shortly before World War I, a tragedy unparalleled in human history. At this time, Western society was in crisis in many ways. The highly developed scientific civilization of the West, which had begun with the Industrial Revolution, had led to a loss of human dignity, and materialism was widespread, with spirituality taking a back seat. Rationality, which many believed could save humanity, had also lost its function, and the nations of Europe were heading toward war. Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis under these circumstances.
At first glance, “The Metamorphosis” seems to be a story of absurdity. The protagonist, Gregor, wakes up from a peaceful dream to find himself in bed, transformed into a hideous insect. Gregor has gone to business school, served in the army, and now works as a salesman for a clothing company. Since his father’s bankruptcy five years ago, he has been supporting his parents and his seventeen-year-old sister Grete. But this sudden unfortunate turn of events has left him feeling angry and hopeless. He can still hear the train on his way to work, but his body has turned into a giant worm, flailing its many legs.
When he doesn’t show up for work, his family knocks on the door and the boss of the company comes to find out why he hasn’t arrived. The boss is furious and threatens to fire Gregor from the company. Gregor tries to plead his case through the locked door, but no one can hear him. When Gregor struggles to open the door a few minutes later, the manager runs away in a panic, leaving his parents devastated. In a threatening gesture, the father lets the bug back into the room, but Gregor is so traumatized that he is wounded and bleeding.
His sister, horrified by his appearance, brings him food, but he is unable to resist. When his mother enters his room two weeks later, she is horrified by the sight of a hideous insect and faints. Once, when Gregor leaves the room, his father becomes enraged and throws an apple at the bug, severely wounding it.
His sister convinces his parents that he can no longer consider the bug his brother and that they must do everything in their power to get rid of it. Gregor returns to his room, weak and stiff, and finally dies. But his father says, “Now, let us give thanks to God,” and the maid cleans up the bug’s corpse, and the family, with their hearts lighter, goes out for a joyous ride in the chariot.
In The Metamorphosis, the insects that Gregor sleeps transformed into are often translated as “bugs” or “vermin,” but the original German word is “Ungeziefer. This is a term that generally refers to harmful creatures, including birds and small animals. It’s hard to tell what kind of creature Kafka had in mind based on his descriptions. The Russian-born American writer Vladimir Nabokov speculated that it was probably a beetle, based on its greatly inflated body.
The central theme of the work
In The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka shows us anew that family relationships, narrowly defined, and human relationships, broadly defined, are based on self-interest. Gregor is unhappy with his job at a mechanized company. Most of all, he hates getting up early in the morning. “Getting out of bed early makes you stupid,” he thinks, ‘because you need to get enough sleep.’ But his parents have failed in business and are in debt, and he can’t quit his job until they pay off the debt.
So while Gregor earns a living as an office worker, his family loves and appreciates him. However, when he suddenly becomes a bug, he is not only rejected by his family, but also antagonized as a nuisance and a blot on the family’s honor. They even wish Gregor would die rather than live on as a disgrace to the family.
Borrowing a concept from German sociologist Ferdinand Zündnies, Kafka sharply criticizes the values of the “Gesellschaft” in this work. Traditionally, a family is a “Gemeinschaft,” or communal society, which, unlike an organization like a company, values the natural bonds of love and trust that can be found among its members. Gregor’s family initially seems to embrace the values of a communal society. However, when Gregor is transformed into a bug and can no longer provide for his family, he abandons the values of the communal society and immediately embraces the values of the profit society. The characteristics that define the profit society are artificial, ideological, and mechanical values.
As the saying goes, the family is the most basic unit of society. Individuals come together to form families, and families form societies and nations. The collapse of the family means the collapse of society or the state. In The Metamorphosis, Kafka broadens the scope of family members and focuses on human relationships. In the modern profit society, all human relationships are based solely on interests. It is a distorted self-portrait of modern society that human relationships are established when they are beneficial and beneficial to me, but otherwise they have no meaning.
Moreover, in The Metamorphosis, Kafka shows us how humans live day by day like insects in modern civilization. Modern man is nothing more than a small cog in the giant machine of capitalist society. The fact that Gregor Jamsa, the protagonist of the film, is a salaryman supports this idea. Without any creative joy, he goes to work early in the morning and returns home exhausted in the evening, and this life is repeated day after day like a squirrel’s wheel. In short, the sleeper who has turned into a bug in this work is a modern man who has lost the meaning of his existence and lives in alienation and solitude. Through Gregor’s transformation and death, Kafka eloquently depicts the decline of the middle class, the dehumanization of mass society, and the lonely existence of human beings after the First World War. At the very least, this work is in line with existentialism in that it accepts loneliness and alienation as a way of life in a world of absurdity.
Kafka’s use of form and technique befits these existentialist themes. He does not rely on a well-structured plot, as is common in traditional fiction, but instead relies on a fragmentary, episodic approach.
