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Sunday May 18, 2003
Waking Dream
Written in 1912, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka remains a remarkably modern parable for gaining insight into one’s true nature—that is, if you have the guts. While Kafka wasn’t famous in his lifetime, his legacy is rich.
For how I see the essence of this tale, read Kafka and I: Angst for the Memories inside the main site gallery.
The following excerpt “Gregor Samsa and Modern Spirituality by Martin Greenberg” is from the book Franz Kafka’s the Metamorphosis by Harold Bloom; Chelsea House, 1988.
The mother follow’d, weeping loud,
“0, that I such a fiend should bear!”
—BLAKE
In the Middle Ages it was the temporal which was the inessential in relation to spirituality; in the nineteenth century the opposite occurred: the temporal was primary and the spiritual was the inessential parasite which gnawed away at it and tried to destroy it.
—SARTRE
The Metamorphosis is peculiar as a narrative in having its climax in the very first sentence: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” The rest of the novella falls away from this high point of astonishment in one long expiring sigh, punctuated by three subclimaxes (the three eruptions of the bug from the bedroom). How is it possible, one may ask, for a story to start at the climax and then merely subside? What kind of story is that?
