Yup, Smith gets straight to the heart of it.īut even if you've never grappled with what it means to be a certain nationality or religion or gender, we know that you've had at least one crisis of identity-everything started being horribly peculiar and filled with doubts as soon as you hit middle school. He's disgusting.īut he still has a human brain-right? He's still himself-right? Wait.īut we'll let Zadie Smith take the reins here, because she's got a diamond-brilliant point:įor there is a sense in which Kafka's Jewish Question ("What have I in common with Jews?") has become everybody's question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts What is Muslimness? What is Femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. (We're the world's biggest lit nerds-you should see our tats.)īut, real talk: The Metamorphosis is probably the best example of alienation made It's not often that we a) get our sincerity on or b) let another writer in the driver's seat when we're talking about why you should care about a work of literature. What is The Metamorphosis About and Why Should I Care? and you're about halfway towards understanding the sheer visceral and cerebral punch that The Metamorphosis packs. Think of what would happen if the deadpan insanity of Clickhole was fused with one of Cronenberg's more twisted movies. No matter how you analyze this creeptastic carnival of a book, you'll set it down with a feeling that is equal parts horror and deep amazement. Heavy stuff indeed for a story about a cockroach who likes to slurp putrid waste and hang upside down from the ceiling. And others view Gregor's monstrous insect form as representing Gregor's radical refusal to submit to society's values and conventions, much in the same way as the Nietzschean Übermensch. A Marxist would read Gregor's inability to work as a protest against the dehumanizing and self-alienating effects of working in a capitalistic society. Gregor's conflict with his father and the dream-like quality of the story is seen as a nod to both Freud's analysis of dreams and the Oedipal complex. Other critics point to Kafka's readings of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche as a way into the complex philosophical themes of this warped little fairy tale. Or is philosophical/political analysis more your style? You're covered. Gregor's transformation into a puke-inducing parasite is often viewed as an expression of Kafka's feelings of isolation and inferiority. Dude had every reason to feel alone: not only was he a German speaker living in Czech Prague, and a Jew living in hyper anti-Semitic times, but Kafka also felt enormous pressure to become a successful businessman like his father.
A lot of critics look to Kafka's biographical and historical context to argue that this story, published in 1912, expresses Kafka's personal sense of alienation. Like biographical analysis? You're in luck. And there is way more than one way to analyze a novella that has crawled, cockroach-like, inside the collective brainpan of the international reading public.
#KAFKA FRANZ METAMORPHOSIS SKIN#
To use a nasty phrase that we think Kafka would have liked: there is more than one way to skin a cat (gross). Perhaps it's because of the story's nightmare-meets-contents-of-a-Google Calendar quality that a veritable critical industry has been devoted to figuring out exactly what the story is all about (besides a warning against throwing apples at your son). Gregor's totally abrupt and unexplained transformation is juxtaposed with a lot of really mundane day-to-day details (waking up late, cleaning house) and the result is, well, textbook Kafkaesque. The Metamorphosis is a story about a man, Gregor Samsa, who wakes up as a gigantic, incredibly disgusting bug. And The Metamorphosis is considered to be about as Kafkaesque as Kafka gets. You don't get your last name turned into a synonym for deeply disturbed alienation unless you write some pretty messed-up stuff.
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