In the category of
European Lit, Bartleby and the Scriveners are pleased to select
Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis.
We're very pleased to have been able to select this work by an author whose work is so iconic that it spawned an adjective: Kafkaesque. His bleak novels have a dark, nightmarish quality, often situating his narrators in surreal, peculiar circumstances with no way out. Kafka himself was a virtual shut-in, suffering from too many medical ailments to name, and died in relative obscurity without seeing much of his work in print. Even his own death was darkly ironic: he died of starvation, having been rendered unable to eat by a throat infection. Upon his death, his executor Max Brod had been instructed to burn his books; Brod did not comply with Kafka's wish, and thus a new genre of darkly modern, surreal fiction was born.
The Metamorphosis is Kafka's most famous work, and also his only finished novel (though some call it a novella). It tells the story of Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find that he has been transformed into a giant insect. In that sense,
The Metamorphosis is not about a transformation at all, since that transformation has already taken place, if you want to be technical. However, we learn very quickly that Gregor's life has been that of a "bug" for a long time, and as his physical appearance becomes more monstrous, his inner life takes on newfound richness as he finally frees himself from the grips of his equally monstrous (though in their case psychologically) family. Gregor dies grotesquely, from an abscessed, infected piece of fruit lodged in his shell, and he is taken out with the trash, quite notably unmourned by a family that had begun to see him as a burden. The reader is left to wonder: who is/was the burden here? Who the parasite? Indeed, his family exults vampirically upon Gregor's death, having feasted, as it were, on his flesh and discarded his dessicated remains. Ominously, in the final sentence, Gregor's parents turn their parasitic eyes toward their one surviving daughter:
Quote:
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All the time, Grete was becoming livelier. With all the worry they had been having of late her cheeks had become pale, but, while they were talking, Mr. and Mrs. Samsa were struck, almost simultaneously, with the thought of how their daughter was blossoming into a well built and beautiful young lady. They became quieter. Just from each other's glance and almost without knowing it they agreed that it would soon be time to find a good man for her. And, as if in confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions, as soon as they reached their destination Grete was the first to get up and stretch out her young body.
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