Franz Kafkas The Metamorphosis :: Metamorphosis essays

The Metamorphosis The Metamorphosis is the story of a commercial traveler, Gregor Samsa,that one morning awoke turned into a gigantic insect. It is no dreambut, but and plainly, a real metamorphosis with no rhetoric inbetween. Facing this incredible fact, Kafka does not do any realisticconcessions and keeps the new condition of the vitrine to the end.That makes of The metamorphosis a hard work of fiction, in the way ofOdyssey (with which, besides, it is closely related) or in the way ofthe Medieval fairy tales, specially those in which the blotto witchturns The Prince Charming into a hideous animal. From the other side, the work, that belongs to a trilogy about marriagein relation to the individual, the family and the so-ciety written byKafka, has a highly autobiographical contain. In The Judgment thesubject is the engagement assumed as a treason to the literary callingin The metamorphosis there is a celestial horizon of marriage and family relationsfrom a masochistic and incest uous perspective in The Trial, it is thesettlement of accounts, related with the incapacity of accomplishing theacquired compro-mises, according to an unwritten law, he must pay. Inthe three cases, the story ends with the protagonists death. The Metamorphosis is built on a fiction level with two faces, Crime andPunishment by Dostoevsky and Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,superposed in a way they get in contact with a real level with two facestoo, the family relations and his dreams of Felice. By the merging oftheses two levels, Kafka gets a fantastic reality which allows him toexpress his deepest dreams and desires in relation with marriage and sexin a poetic language that turns The Metamorphosis into a classic oferotism, outlook not considered until now. (Such a pleiad, Kafka, Sacher-Masoch and Dostoesky, met in The Metamorphosis turns into a height ofmasochism this work). PART ONE The Metamorphosis has three parts the first one describes both the fracture of Gregory a nd his familys reaction to this respect thesecond part shows the new cotidianity of the fami-liar group whosefragile estability crush with Gregory and sis-ters bringing face toface and the last part, where we attend Gregorys frustrated attemp ofreconquering his sister, ends with his death. The suck up onto which Kafka builds his work is Dostoevskys novel.This one brings to him a textual base that he lightly, mainly throughsubstitutions, varies for adapting it to the intentions of his ownstory. For the first part of The Meta-morphosis, Kafka takes three