![]() The simple, but metaphorically multilayered, story depicts multiple similarities between Kafka's real life and Gregor Samsa, the leading charachter.Īt the time Kafka wrote Metamorphosis, his own life situation resembled to an astonishing degree Gregor Samsa's just before his metamorphosis. In Metamorphosis ("Die Verwandlung"), Kafka uses a literary device that focuses the readers' attention on a single character that symbolizes himself and his life. Most authors use symbolism to relate the theme of their work, not Franz Kafka. It is unusual to say the least to open a novel and the first line is about the main character waking up as a large insect. He smiled wearily and remarked, with a small disclaiming movement of his hand, 'Oh no! He didn't get it from me. Metamorphosis is death giving way to life, to “new dreams and good intentions”, to the bliss of amnesia.""I took Garnett's Lady Fox novel out of my pocket, put it in front of Franz and told him 'Garnett copied your Metamorphosis literary device'. The story is about the transformation of human presence into a parasitical, ever-demanding memory whose presence is all the more threatening because it has to be denied by the very people who mourn for it. The recasting of roles and lives sever the bonds of nostalgia and the final breach is the act of locking him up to die among the junk of overcrowded memories. Craving for the attention due to him, he forgets his own debased state (that of death) as the remembrance of his erstwhile beneficial physical ‘presence’ forces him to venture out of his own room. The “memory stuff” gradually overflow and suffocate Gregor’s space. As time passes, the insect becomes just one of the memories which accumulate in the room. Initially, the characters give ample space for the insect, they leave Gregor’s room untouched, ‘unblemished’, so as to let his memory “creep” along the walls unrestricted. The intrusion of the dead upon the living becomes a real, catastrophic menace that the lives of the rest of the characters have to be moulded accordingly. The memory becomes so persistently redundant, what remains is merely the forgetting. The nagging presence of Memory is a suffocating, incriminating tyranny whose only cure is Time, with which Gregor’s sister finally confronts the monstrosity of the Presence and locks away the insect in its room. The monstrous insect is a parasitic, ugly being, with appetites and obstinacies, the seamy side of Memory, feeding on the emotional and nostalgic residue that Samsa’s self-effacing life and ‘death’ warrants from the people around him. ![]() In Kafka’s novella, Metamorphosis, the transformation of Gregor Samsa into a life-size dung beetle, is perhaps, a metaphor for a nightmarish situation where memories come to life. What then, does it mean, to die? What does death do to the memory of the past? Are they like ripples on water, disturbances on the surface, submerged just as easily as they appear? ![]() Both are not always simultaneous one precedes the other. The other kind is when a person vanishes completely, out of memory, out of thought, and out of presence. One is when the body becomes inert and cold all of a sudden and you feel, somehow, this is death for sure.
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