Metamorphosis by Franz KafkaI

A review of an acclaimed story by Franz Kafka (1883-1924) - a Czech Jew author writing in the times when Nazism was an emergent movement.

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka:

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a Czech Jew writing in German. He wrote his stories and novels in the period around the First World War and his writing reflects an acute apprehension of his position as a person belonging to a minority community and a persecuted race in the menacing socio-political situation prevalent in those times. S Grant Duff in Europe and the Czechs (1938) informs us that in the nineteenth century the Czechs ‘were fighting on two fronts- against the Austrian imperial system and against the Germans. Delving further into the history of Nazism Duff draws attention to the fact that the ‘excesses and racial hatred of Nazism is native to Bohemia, as is the movement itself. Long before Adolf Hitler and his friends collected in the beer hall in Munich after the war, Nazism had become a flourishing concern among the Sudeten Germans’ (38). The movement was directed both against the Czechs and Jews and in this way Kafka must have been doubly disadvantaged.

In Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis the protagonist Gregor Samsa eventually gives in after a prolong struggle with his subhuman existence. The story acquires surreal dimensions as the boundaries between dream and reality are disturbed and awakening of Gregor Samsa from his sleep is followed by a situation that has nightmarish elements rather than the consolation of routine. The 'matter- of- fact' tone of Kafka’s narrative jangles with the incomprehensible happenings that occur in the story. Kafka was noted for making use of realism to articulate absurd situations.

Eugene Ionesco, a renowned playwright and doyen of the Theatre of Absurd says, ‘Everything, as I see it, is an aberration’. He articulates his disenchantment with the world in these words: ‘I have tried to deal… with emptiness, with frustration, with this world, at once fleeting and crushing. The characters I have used are not fully conscious of their spiritual rootlessness, but they feel it instinctively and emotionally’. There are perceptible affinities in the writings of Kafka. Kafka, in fact, was a pre-cursor to the Absurd writers like Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. These writers convey through their writings a tangible sense of ‘rootlessness’ and ‘meaninglessness’ of the modern existence. But Kafka must have had the racial context in perspective that allowed a quantum of meaningful protest against crushing forces. It was strange and morbid experience though not utterly lacking in significance though it reached a point of absurdity.

It seems that Gregor’s physical transformation into a repulsive insect renders form to his undermined subjectivity or using a critical phrase offers an ‘objective corelative’ to his position in the social pyramid. Duff claims that the Czechs were then ‘invading the German districts in response to the demand for labour’(38). He asserts that the ‘German bourgeois treated the Czechs as underlings’ and the German workers ‘found racial grounds for their antagonism,’ and put up their notices saying: Jews, Czechs and Dogs not admitted (38). Gruff further informs the reader that they were ‘organized at first in the German workers’ Party which was formed in 1908, and in 1917 they even took the name which Hitler afterwards borrowed for his party-The German National socialist Workers’ Party’(38). Activities and groups of this kind must have evoked a fear of the fast emerging totalitarian state and an apprehension of oneself as a threatened individual. In other words, Gregor’s perception is so acute that he is literally transformed into a dungbeetle perhaps as a result of being treated like one. There is a correspondence between the historical author’s identity and the chief character portrayed in the The Metamorphosis. Certainly, there is a cue to this effect but no overt statement is made in this way.