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 dream but, simply and plainly, a real metamorphosis with no rhetoric in between. Facing this incredible fact, Kafka does not do any realistic concessions and keeps the new condition of the character to the end. That makes of The metamorphosis a hard work of fiction, in the way of Odyssey (with which, besides, it is closely related) or in the way of the Medieval fairy tales, specially those in which the wicked witch turns The Prince Charming into a hideous animal. >From the other side, the work, that belongs to a trilogy about marriage in relation to the individual, the family and the so-ciety written by Kafka, has a highly autobiographical contain. In The Judgment the subject is the engagement assumed as a treason to the literary calling; in The metamorphosis there is a view of marriage and family relations from a masochistic and incestuous perspective; in The Trial, it is the settlement of accounts, related with the incapacity of accomplishing the acquired compro-mises, according to an unwritten law, he must pay. In the three cases, the story ends with the protagonist's death. The Metamorphosis is built on a fiction level with two faces, Crime and Punishment 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 faces too, the family relations and his dreams of Felice. By the merging of theses two levels, Kafka gets a fantastic reality which allows him to express his deepest dreams and desires in relation with marriage and sex in a poetic language that turns The Metamorphosis into a classic of erotism, aspect not considered until now. (Such a pleiad, Kafka, Sacher- Masoch and Dostoesky, met in The Metamorphosis turns into a height of masochism this work). PART ONE The Metamorphosis has three parts: the first one describes both the transformation of Gregory and his family's reaction to this respect; the second part shows the new cotidianity of the fami-liar group whose fragile estability crush with Gregory and sis-ter's bringing face to face; and the last part, where we attend Gregory's frustrated attemp of reconquering his sister, ends with his death. The foreground onto which Kafka builds his work is Dostoevsky's novel. This one brings to him a textual base that he lightly, mainly through substitutions, varies for adapting it to the intentions of his own story. For the first part of The Meta-morphosis, Kafka takes three