50
edits
The Metamorphosis: Difference between revisions
→Major Themes
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Both Kafka and Gregory are trapped by their daily reality and dreams of freedom, just as both are destined to die a lonely and tortured death through their metamorphosis. Kafka, who always thought in images that have a powerful impact, was first and foremost a poet. “Kafka’s dreamworlds will reveal themselves as realities only to those who dare gaze into the terrifying depths of our age. The dream is only denser reality” (Baumer 11). | Both Kafka and Gregory are trapped by their daily reality and dreams of freedom, just as both are destined to die a lonely and tortured death through their metamorphosis. Kafka, who always thought in images that have a powerful impact, was first and foremost a poet. “Kafka’s dreamworlds will reveal themselves as realities only to those who dare gaze into the terrifying depths of our age. The dream is only denser reality” (Baumer 11). | ||
===Marxism=== | |||
Karl Marx distinguishes human labor from that of animal productivity by the fact that “doing one’s work for its own sake affords the worker joy” (Sokel 106). Gregor is working in order to support his family and pay his parents’ debt. His employment is “totally determined by needs external to itself and Gregor” which is against the philosophy of Marxism that requires there to be some joy and creativeness in the labor that one does. | |||
Marxism sees the worker’s labor being exploited by the capitalist employer. “Gregor’s relationship with his father thus represents this exact paradigm” as a majority of Gregor’s earnings go to his parents’ debt and the needs of the household (Sokel 108). Only a small amount is retained by Gregor himself. It is this servitude in which the fruit of Gregor’s labor belongs to someone else and the is a “loss of self” (Sokel 108). | |||
The three lodgers represent another level of capitalism. They “assume the dominant place in the household merely by virtue of their paying power” which allows them free reign within the household with all the members eager to cater to them (Sokel 112). This only “brings to ahead what had been the family’s enslavement to the capitalist world through the father’s original guilt” (Sokel 113). | |||
Gregor’s metamorphosis renders his physical body no longer human rendering him no longer able to aid his family in sustaining their physical needs. He becomes alone and isolated even taking on the likes and hobbies of the insect in which he is transformed into. This is what Marx referred to as the “total dehumanization of man which he saw as the ultimate fate of man under capitalism” (Sokel 110). Gregor’s transformation | |||
==Characters== | ==Characters== | ||