Your name Student Name Professor Name Subject 27 September, 2012 The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka is, perhaps, the most ambiguous and mysterious figure of the European and world literature of the 20th century. Being the recognized innovator, the master of a word, he created the unsteady dreamy world and placed his heroes in it, dooming them to the eternal wandering in emptiness and attempt to find the answers to nonexistent questions. Kafka, like nobody before him, showed the absurdity of the world and futility of hopes. His books are especially popular among the readers nowadays, and his mysterious figure does not leave the researchers indifferent, forcing them to struggle with the hundred riddles of Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis (from the German Die Verwandlung), the novel of Franz Kafka, was written in 1912. It is the most known small work of the author, a masterpiece written in a protocol form peculiar to the author, tells about fantastic events. The Metamorphosis by Kafka shows the tragedy of the lonely, abandoned man in front of the absurd and senseless destiny. This is the drama of a small man, facing the irreconcilable, obscure and grandiose fate, represented in various manifestations. Metamorphoses occur in a family of the protagonist once in a wonderful morning. A loving and careful son, the unique supporter in a family becomes sick; and his illness is not known to the science. The protagonist changes, his behavior changes, and, as a result, the attitude to his family changes. As Gregor Samsa awake one morning from a troubled dream, he found himself changed in his bed to some monstrous kind of vermin (Kafka: 1946).

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Kafka achieved the philosophical depth, insoluble questions concerning a trick of fate, a divine providence, a biological nature and a social human life. The internal spring, defining the psychology of todays society and time, its pathological brutality and cruelty, were revealed by the writer with the feeling of a painful hopelessness. The fantastic image created by Kafka, seems provocative owing to its demonstrative not esthetics. If to imagine a similar metamorphosis in a real life, all further events and behavior of people around do not cause surprise. The only thing surprises greatly - how simply, in an ordinary way the author told about the everyday inconveniences which have begun for the hero and his family from the moment of transformation. Kafka narrated about them with such a dry and laconic language the readers as though involuntarily forget about the incredibility of the fact, which became the basis of the novel. The Metamorphosis is the brightest expression of a tragic attitude and Franz Kafkas outlook. The transformation situation in this novel, as well as in other works of the author, allows different interpretations. At the same time the most trivial interpretation lies almost on a surface. It is the alienation in a family and society, loneliness of the sensitive person, capable to compassion and self-sacrifice, the absolute loneliness caused by the awareness of the dissimilarity to the others. Kafka pointed this hopelessness of the hero to a limit by means of a terrible metonymy: he showed a complete spiritual isolation of the hero through an improbable metamorphosis of his appearance. The hero of the novel is Kafka, transformed by his unsociable character, his tendency to loneliness, and his constant thoughts about the writing to a certain similarity of a monster. He is consistently cut off from his work, family, meetings with other people, locked in a room where nobody dares to step, and which is gradually emptied from the furniture. There are too many coincidences of parallelism between Franz Kafka and Gregor Samsa to ignore the obviousness of the theme of Kafkas work.

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Judging from the depth of depiction in his works, there is no other possible explanation than Kafkas writing is a representation of himself and his life, that he just uses a different method of observation (Batson: 2011). A person exists only when he is active, i.e. he is valid as a person only in his activity, because the activity is the fact by means of which a human life is created. Human life is the creation of this life. A person is the subject and object of the activity, and these two forms are not delayed in time. They exist as the uniform subject - object, but are not broken into two various acts. The open cynicism of this world is well combined with the system of the incessant rigid clownishness mixed with a vulgar frankness of behavior of all its inhabitants, at the same time at the observance of the obligatory strict hierarchy and rituality of the got internal schedule, not excluding a certain infernal touch on everything. The Metamorphosis is a big work about a fear, about the state of lonely human being, victimized by the hostile civilization; about a person, doomed in each attempt to reach the law, to achieve the justice, even if he is active. The philosophy of a human life, standing beyond the politics and class theories, comes from the psychology of fear. This universal absence of freedom of the mankind entangled by chains - social, ideological, psychological, and moral - were revealed by Kafka in his artistic images of The Metamorphosis. Understanding his hero and sincerely sympathizing with him, the writer speaks of the defenselessness of a person, facing the surrounding reality. A human being is only terrestrial ashes, a clay clod, powerless, helpless, experiencing sufferings and continuous painful defeats, doomed to the estrangement even in the environment of the closest people, to the desolate loneliness and, at last, to death.

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Batson, R. (2011). Kafka-Samsa. Reality Through Symbolism. The Kafka Project. Available at: http://www.kafka.org/index.php?aid=225 Kafka, Franz. (1946). The Metamorphosis. Mattituck: Vanguard Press.