“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke up from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.”
Umm…
Where to start?
It’s a bit of a weird one…
I mean…
How is one supposed to write about a book which begins with that bombshell?
No explanation, no information, just a blunt statement of ‘fact’. How ironic! Kafka’s use of detached language and frank tone makes the whole situation seem somehow realistic and factual when let’s be honest, waking up as a cockroach with no explanation is about as realistic as a unicorn flying around on a griffin’s back drinking polyjuice potion.
Réda Bensmaïa comments that we cannot read 'Metamorphosis' with the sense that we "emerge unscathed." * I totally agree. The crude image of poor Samsa being condemned to a bug's life and his ensuing suicide (spoiler!) is a rather uncomfortable one but this idea of emerging "unscathed" runs deeper. It feels like Kafka is being unfair on the reader. His detached style leaves the reader feeling unsatisfied and full of questions. We feel like we have been deprived of answers we should rightly get. We rarely read about Samsa's feelings and we only get to see his basic ideas of why he is cursed, not the actual truth.There is no omniscient narrator telling us the ultimate truths, revealing them to the reader as the text progresses. Like Samsa, the reader is blind and this (personally) made me feel out of control and at a loss over what to think. Kafka ingeniously manages to impose the confusion the character's could feel onto the reader simply through his style which I think is worth applauding.
Umm…
Where to start?
It’s a bit of a weird one…
I mean…
How is one supposed to write about a book which begins with that bombshell?
No explanation, no information, just a blunt statement of ‘fact’. How ironic! Kafka’s use of detached language and frank tone makes the whole situation seem somehow realistic and factual when let’s be honest, waking up as a cockroach with no explanation is about as realistic as a unicorn flying around on a griffin’s back drinking polyjuice potion.
Réda Bensmaïa comments that we cannot read 'Metamorphosis' with the sense that we "emerge unscathed." * I totally agree. The crude image of poor Samsa being condemned to a bug's life and his ensuing suicide (spoiler!) is a rather uncomfortable one but this idea of emerging "unscathed" runs deeper. It feels like Kafka is being unfair on the reader. His detached style leaves the reader feeling unsatisfied and full of questions. We feel like we have been deprived of answers we should rightly get. We rarely read about Samsa's feelings and we only get to see his basic ideas of why he is cursed, not the actual truth.There is no omniscient narrator telling us the ultimate truths, revealing them to the reader as the text progresses. Like Samsa, the reader is blind and this (personally) made me feel out of control and at a loss over what to think. Kafka ingeniously manages to impose the confusion the character's could feel onto the reader simply through his style which I think is worth applauding.
* Réda Bensmaïa "Foreword: The Kafka Effect" trans. Terry Cochran, in Kafka
Toward a Minor Literature, ed. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Dana
Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986), ix-xxi, esp.ix
Toward a Minor Literature, ed. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Dana
Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1986), ix-xxi, esp.ix