Blog 6
Uncharted Books
The Metamorphosis is a story about George Samsa, a young man that one morning awakes as a giant insect in his own bed. The story follows the struggles of George and his family as they have to deal with this new affliction that has come to terrorize the family. A rather short short story with only around 40 pages, Franz Kafka beautifully writes a story about the struggles of human existence.
The problem of alienation is explored to depth in the novel- Gregor may have transformed to something unusual at the core he is still the same however he faces problem of acceptance by society due to his transformed appearance, which ridicules his being- his existence- as if he is thrown into the hell of nothingness without any notice. The feebleness of his existence disintegrates his being into nothingness, under the sheer pressure of the society- the ‘Other’. The author robs Gregor-the protagonist- of every sense of his inauthentic existence by stealing off all assumptions of his life, now he is striped down to the very core of his existence.
Gregor Samsa can make us ponder our own character, our identity, about the smoothness of what we take to be steady and fixed, and about the dangers and supernatural occurrences of our own metamorphosis. Kafka gives us that how the conventions of normal society are twisted because of our incompetence to look past the surface to the individual inside.
This novella is much different than a lot of things I have read before, more focused into a philosophical ideology on existentialism. Kafka uses Gregor to show the existence of an individual determining his own development and fate once he becomes less than a human at the expense for his past. I am unsure whether I would be able to use this book in a classroom, I definitely believe that it is a good book but I would need to do a lot of research into existentialism and Franz Kafka’s ideology.
