These authors’ literary work can never be defined by a single relationship in their lives.
Each story’s setting offers evidence of resentful feelings towards the authors’ state of confinement. Everything That Rises Must Converge, like most of O’Connor’s stories, is set in the South. The conflicted and often humorously grim social setting she paints is instantly recognizable as an O’Connor creation. A majority of her characters are a product of their time and place, and most of them are seen clutching desperately to the ignorance and outdated customs of the past. In fact, Julian’s mother, like “the grandmother” in A Good Man is Hard to Find, is not specifically identified or named. It is as if “the old lady” and “the grandmother” could be any mother or any grandmother in the Southern region. O’Connor depicts this reality with obvious satire and disgust in a way that indicates how she may have been personally affected by it. It is very possible that she felt, as critic Ann E. Rueman puts it, “bottled up by Southern codes of silence and Catholic respect for elders, and aggravated by dependence on her mother without hope of change in her status. . .” (537), and allowed much of this frustration to seep through her work. Kafka, by stark contrast, does not explore such a broad setting in his story, The Metamorphosis. The entire story is set in the family house, and specifically in Gregor’s own bedroom. Throughout the story, his room becomes a prison; Gregor even resorts to jailing himself underneath a couch while his sister is in the room. As an invalid in his family’s home, he becomes more and more confined to his immediate surroundings:
. . . with each passing day his view of distant things grew fuzzier; the hospital across the r...
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...hat happen to them are completely inseparable from their belated revelations and awakenings. The three previously mentioned stories, all deal with societal, racial, and especially religious facets of the human experience. Along with these factors, she explores pride, conceit, and ignorance. Most of her characters are morally ambiguous - a mixture of good and bad.
As writers, neither Franz Kafka nor Flannery O’Connor received sincere approval from their parents concerning their art. While this fact in no way hampered their desire or ability to create beautifully haunting work, there is evidence that it left bitter feelings. In his letter to his father, Kafka states: “you struck a better blow when you aimed at my writing, and hit, unknowingly, all that went with it. . . but my writing dealt with you, I lamented there only what I could not lament on your breast.”
The Metamorphosis is said to be one of Franz Kafka's best works of literature. It shows the difficulties of living in a modern society and the struggle for acceptance of others when in a time of need. In this novel Kafka directly reflects upon many of the negative aspects of his personal life, both mentally and physically. The relationship between Gregor and his father is in many ways similar to Franz and his father Herrman. The Metamorphosis also shows resemblance to some of Kafka's diary entries that depict him imagining his own extinction by dozens of elaborated methods. This paper will look into the text to show how this is a story about the author's personal life portrayed through his dream-like fantasies.
Throughout literature, the consequences of isolation and alienation are exploited to display the requirement of personal interaction and social inclusion for society. Similarly, Franz Kafka seeks to uncover the potential damage of social rejection through Gregor's transformation within The Metamorphosis, which leads to his separation from both his family and his past life. Within a healthy life lies the power of communication; however, Kafka in The Metamorphosis captures the effects of isolation and its deadly consequences through the alienation caused by Gregor’s lack of communication.
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is a classic piece of literature. This masterpiece of stunning psychological, sociological and existential angst has blessed the minds of readers since it was written in 1912. It is the story of Gregor Samsa, a hardworking man trying to pay off the debt of his family, but transforms into a vermin, (bug). There are many parallels of Kafka’s life to Gregor’s in Metamorphosis. Both Kafka and Gregor were in family and social discord, and a bureaucracy of a work world. The way Kafka chose to write his novella, in third person limited omniscient narration, serves his purpose of wanting to understand and reflect on his own experiences along with entertaining. Choosing Gregor to narrate the novella would change the purpose, plot, and understanding of the story.
Gregor sits in his room and everything is recognizable. Nothing in his room is changed. The walls are the same. The bed is the same. The view from the window is the same. However, the only unrecognizable thing in the room is himself; Gregor is unaware of who and what he is. Separation is the state of being moved apart from something else. Isolation is where something is unable to come into contact with something else. Damaged relationships are common and can have emotional strain. In The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, existential anxiety, transformation, isolation, and damaged relationships demonstrate how alienation is detrimental to a person’s humanity.
In sequence, the story progresses into an ultimate partial realization of Gregor’s predicament and its origins. Gregor Samsa’s obliviousness to his daily experiences, in essence, produce his present plight by allowing himself to fall farther from reality. Occurrences after the transformation collectively form reasoning for the bizarre situation Gregor remains in as a result of Kafka’s muddied plot setup. Various characters partake amongst this indirect syntax as symbols of the world Gregor is not aware of. Work takes over as Gregor stands as the sole provider, leaving him with few focuses or cares.
Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
Both Gregor and Meursault have pivotal experiences with denial, the first stage of the grief process, in their respective novels. While Gregor refuses to accept his transformation in order to remain a part of society, Meursault denies God in the religious culture of Algeria, proving his individuality while isolating himself. Gregor’s denial takes place when he prepares for work, ignoring his transformation, “First of all he wanted to get up quietly, […] get dressed, […] have breakfast, and only then think about what to do next” (Kafka 6). By characterizing Gregor as determined, Kafka shows his protagonist’s resolve to remain firm in ignoring his transformation for his family’s sake. Typically, such a metamorphosis would warrant panic, but Gregor is so selfless that he denies his own emotions to be useful for his family. Through the sequential syntax employed in this quoate, Kafka shows that Gregor does not want to stray from his usual routine. This attribute, along with his physical transformation, separates Gregor from humanity. With his unfamiliar mindset, seen through the denial of his metamorphosis, and his lack of human physical charac...
Franz Kafka always had a strong background in literature and writing. Pursuing a career in law, Kafka put his writing skills to good use, but he always had a knack and passion for writing literature such as short stories, poetry and full novels more than working his actual job. By the age of 27, Kafka attended a play put on by a Yiddish theatre troupe performing in Prague. With the lack of money the troupe had, they became stranded in the town, where Kafka gained his interest in Yiddish theatre (Gray, 301). With the stranding of this troupe, critics believed this to be what led to the influence of most of Kafka’s later writings. This is believed due to the evidence of a journal found after Kafka’s death. These journals kept records of performances he attended, plot synopses, character analysis, descriptions of staging and critiques of the performances (Gray, 301). Kafka also had a journal filled with vignettes about specific productions, along with brief reflections on the theater and the production (Puchner, 177). We first see Kafka showin...
This was the case of Franz Kafka; his inability to physically express his opinions to his family in reality, lead him to intellectually pursue his thoughts and relationship into the imaginary, his writings, as displayed in his short novella, “Metamorphosis.” Due to Kafka's life background and the nature of his society in the beginning of twentieth century in Prague, his only and main outlet in expressing his thoughts were to put them down onto paper. As a result, Kafka utilizes these two elements to satirize his internal thoughts into fiction. Although his stories are label as fiction, beyond its contextual interpretation, his stories are a reflection of his life. Needless to say, the most apparent factors that bleed through “Metamorphosis” are Kafka’s life relationship with his family and how he saw himself within that dynamic. Therefore, we can imply that the protagonist Gregor Samsa in “Metamorphosis” can well be the embodiment of Kafka himself. However, because the novella was written in fictional form, where taking the impossible of reality and making it possible, it can be hard to relate the interaction among characters to Kafka real life relation to his family. None the less, through the lens of biographical criticism in the analysis of “Metam...
Many people would argue that Kafka reflects his personal life in The Metamorphosis. These people would describe it as an autobiographical work. Kafka’s parents were very similar to that of Gregor. He was born into a wealthy family and his father was an overbearing man. His mother was a very nice woman, as Gregor’s was in the novel, but she often took the side of his father. The striking resemblance of the families is that of Gregor’s sister. Kafka’s sister, like Gregor’s si...
To fully understand this story, it’s important to have some background information on Franz Kafka. He was born into a German speaking family in Prague on July 3rd, 1883. He was the oldest of six children. His father Harmann Kafka was a business man. His mother Julie Kafka was born into a wealthy family. Kafka considered the vast differences in his paternal and maternal relatives as a “split within himself” (Sokel 1). Kafka felt that “the powerful, self-righteous, and totally unselfconscious personality of his father had stamped him with an ineradicable conviction of his own inferiority and guilt” (Sokel 1). He felt the o...
Franz Kafka is known as one of the most prominent writers from the twentieth century. In 1883 he was born in Prague, which was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time. Kafka’s family is of Jewish decent and was a part of the German speaking community, which was hated and distrusted by the Czech speaking majority of Prague (Kafka’s Life). Kafka is known for his intricate style of writing on peculiar subjects. Many of his novels are based on “real world” problems and societies. Kafka often presents a grotesque representation of society through themes of isolation, guilt, and corruption (Kafka’s Life). The Trial is known as one of Kafka’s greatest feats. It follows a man by the name of Josef K and his sudden arrest one morning for an unnamed crime. Josef desperately tries to thwart the arrest against an unjust and secretive court system, but is eventually killed (The Trial, Kafka). The Trial is not only about a man who lives in a corrupt society, but also a critique on society in the real world. Josef K is a man surrounded by corruption; the government that tries him is unjust, the people he meets are tarnished, and even the air that he breathes is thick with fraud. Josef K seems to be the only seemingly guiltless person in his society. However, corruption marginalizes Kafka from society and eventually kills him off.
In Franz Kafka’s short story, Metamorphosis, the idea of existentialism is brought out in a subtle, yet definite way. Existentialism is defined as a belief in which an individual is ultimately in charge of placing meaning into their life, and that life alone is meaningless. They do not believe in any sort of ultimate power and focus much of their attention on concepts such as dread, boredom, freedom and nothingness. This philosophical literary movement emerged in the twentieth-century, when Kafka was establishing his writing style in regards to alienation and distorted anxiety. A mirror to his own personal lifestyle, this story follows the short and sad life of a man unable to break out of the bonds society has placed on him. These bonds are not only evident in the work place, but at home too. Being constantly used and abused while in his human form, Gregor’s lifestyle becomes complicated once he becomes a giant insect and is deemed useless. Conflicts and confusion arise primarily between Gregor and his sister Grete, his parents, and his work. Each of these three relationships has different moral and ethical complications defining them. However, it is important for one to keep in mind that Gregor’s metamorphosis has placed him into a position of opposition, and that he has minimal control over the events to take place. Conflicts will also occur between family members as they struggle with the decision of what to do with Gregor. In the end they all come to the agreement that maintaining his uselessness is slowly draining them and they must get rid of him.
...ained by the "love" the admiration of his family, and his inability to realize his position is another path to his demise. Kafka's Samsa family reflects the darkness of human nature, and the expectations of society on individual, as Gregor Samsa undergoes a physical, emotional, and mental transformation as he awakes one morning to find himself transformed into a "monstrous vermin." Gregor, seemingly innocent, experiences something which will allow him to reject the burdens of society, and alter his own perception of reality; however, Kafka also illustrates society's brutal reaction to these attempts, suggesting that one cannot escape these restrictions. The place of society, reflected in the character's throughout the story, is to act as judge and jury on Gregor's condition, allowing their own reactions to Gregor's altered form to determine his worth and value.
Gregor's mother illustrates how fear and anxiety can get in the way of change and progress. People in society are often too scared of the unknown that they would rather ignore the problem, rather than try to fix it. The only person in the story who attempts to understand Gregor after his transformation is his sister. Gregor's sister "to find out what he liked, she brought him a wide selection [of food] that she spread out on an old newspaper" (Kafka 507). While his other family members were