![]() Yet absurdist literature still had a mission-to assert that literature is, like everything else, pointless. His father despised his son.īut any such “meanings” crumple because there is no larger or underlying meaning in the Kafka universe to underpin them. Whenever Franz nervously gave his father one of his works, it would be returned unread. Others have read the story in terms of Kafka’s problematic relationship with his father, a coarse-grained businessman. They woke up suddenly to find their identities had vanished. Kafka and his fellow citizens in Bohemia, centered in Prague, had lived under that vast empire. “The Metamorphosis,” published in 1915, has also been seen as foreshadowing the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, after the First World War. (Kafka was Jewish, and just a little older than Adolf Hitler.) Writers often foresee such things coming before other people do. For example, critics have viewed Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a cockroach as an allegory of anti-Semitism, a grim forecast of the criminal extermination of a supposedly “verminous” race. Paradoxically that meaninglessness allows us to read into Kafka’s novels such as The Trial (which is about a legal “process” which doesn’t process anything), or his stories like “The Metamorphosis,” whatever meanings we please. ![]() It is “absurd.” He believed that the whole human race was the product of one of “God’s bad days.” There is no “meaning” to make sense of our lives. The human condition, for Kafka, is well beyond tragic or depressed. Brod, thankfully, defied the instruction. He instructed his friend and executor Max Brod to burn his literary remains “preferably unread” after his death-he died prematurely, aged forty, from tuberculosis. It’s probable that Kafka did not much care whether we read this sentence or anything that he wrote. It is from a short story, “The Metamorphosis,” by Franz Kafka (1883–1924). If you made a list of the most gripping opening lines in literature, the following would surely make it into the top ten:Īs Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. Check out the rest of our Little Histories here. In the following excerpt, Sutherland introduces Kafka’s literary mission to assert the pointlessness of literature, and discusses his influence on another writer who grappled constantly with the problems of existentialism and absurdism, Albert Camus. Critics have produced countless different theories to explain the significance of Gregor Samsa’s transformation-and this diversity of interpretive meanings, John Sutherland proposes in A Little History of Literature, is the paradoxical result of a type of literature that takes the meaninglessness of life as its premise. ![]() Take, for example, Kafka’s short story, “The Metamorphosis,” in which the main character turns into a giant cockroach. Absurdist literature is notoriously difficult to read.
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