The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

Kafkaâ??s Metamorphosis in one of those texts many will have heard of and, indeed, many will have read. Its high state within the literary hierarchy stems from its concept of human transformation; the metamorphosis of the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, from a human being into an insect; seen as repellent and ugly. Although the concept appears intriguing, this review seeks to iterate my feelings on why Kafka is one of those marmite figures in the literary world: it seems that you either love him or hate him. Franz Kafka was born in Prague (then part of Austria) on July 3, 1883 to Jewish parents and died at an early age in 1924 as a result of the tuberculosis he ...

I first read this text back when I was all of about seventeen, and I wept bitterly for the futility of it, for the anguish of the main character and for the utter pointlessness of existence. When you are an angst ridden teenager, it is hard to look beyond the agony in this short tale and to see anything else that is hapening. Looking at it now, I see that this book has a lot more to offer. The tale is simple, if strange. Gregor is a hard working young man who supports his two parents and his little sister. His father does not work, and without Gregor, the family would not survive. One morning, Gregor wakes to find that he has turned into a beetle. He can no ...

I first read this book when I was 15 years old, I am 20 now and I fully understand it and appreciate it by leaps and bounds more than I did then. This is not so much a simple story about a bloke who wakes up one morning turned into an insect or whatever, this is an epic meditation on the dark recesses of our mind and levels of depraivity humanity is capable of reaching in the depersonalization of men in society. It is the loveliest letter ever written on isolation I have read besides Dostoyevesky's 'Notes from the Underground' and, being a classic of world literature, naturally is stigmatized as perhaps being too mainstream and passe. However, ...