Franz Kafka, in his novella “The Metamorphosis”, and Harry Mulisch, in his novel The Assault, uses dark, lonely diction and imagery to create the isolation within the protagonists. The setting symbolizes how the protagonist’s isolation continues to enlarge throughout the book. At the beginning of both the novels, the setting is more open and light, which is compared to the characters’ isolation that is less bordered and complex. As the settings grow smaller and the characters become lonelier, Anton and Gregor’s isolation become more pronounced. Gregor is gradually becoming isolated by his family causing his transformation to progress rapidly, while Anton’s family is growing, but his isolation is conflicted upon himself, causing the setting to continue to encase them, emphasizing the effects that their isolation takes on them.
The beginning of “The Metamorphosis”, started with Gregor’s transformation and the reason behind it. Gregor shows his first signs of isolation while he was still a human, as a traveling salesman. Gregor isolated himself as he was always alone and away from his home and family when he was working “a grueling job [where he’s] in day, day out, on the road, [having] the torture of traveling… no relationships that last or get intimate” (Kafka 4). The setting at this point was symbolizing the freedom of being a human, but trapped within the city, as he must leave his family to work to provide for them. As the book progresses the setting changes along side with the protagonist. In the middle of the story, the setting symbolizes the progression of the protagonist’s isolation. Such as, Gregor has transformed into a roach and has been completely isolated from the outside world and his family, besides his sister. Aft...
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.... The setting causes Anton to shield himself from the ones he loves and to keep his feelings to himself, by slowly closing in on himself inch by inch, as he is afraid to love anyone and lose them as he did when he was younger.
Although Gregor differs from Anton, as he is being isolated by his own family and Anton isolates him from his own past, the both end up being alone and encased in their physical surroundings along with their mental thoughts. The setting plays a key role in the novels by connecting the surroundings in which showing how the protagonists isolate themselves from their own thoughts and memories from the people around them.
Works Cited
Kafka, Franz. “The Metamorphosis.” The Metamorphosis. Trans. And Ed. Stanley Corngold. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.
Mulisch, Harry. The Assault. Trans. Claire Nicolas White. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
“Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.” John le Carr. The novel Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka is a story about the transformation of a man named Gregor who turned into a bug. The story takes place inside an apartment and describes the struggles Gregor goes through with his life and family. Throughout the entirety of the writing he is met with different challenges and obstacles. Grete, his sister and his parents have a unique bond that is not always the strongest. Gregor has not been close with his parents for awhile, but Grete especially at the beginning was the only person who truly cared about his predicament. This conflict results in the desertion of Gregor and the downfall of the family. These negatives compound, causing the his suicide. The Metamorphosis portrays how the betrayal of Gregor and Grete by their parents, and Gregor by his sister, leads to the demise of the family.
Franz Kafka’s clear isolation of Gregor underlines the families’ separation from society. In The Metamorphosis, Kafka emphasizes Gregor’s seclusion from his family. However, Gregor’s separation is involuntary unlike the family who isolates themselves by the choices they make. Each family member has characteristics separating them from society. These characteristics become more unraveling than Gregor, displaying the true isolation contained in The Metamorphosis.
The story, Metamorphosis, is an unusual story to say the least. The very first sentence one meets the main character, Gregor Samsa. This sentence really shows how different this story is when compared to other books in this class. Throughout the story the author, Franz Kafka, wants the reader to sympathize with Gregor. ‘When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed’ (87), is the first sentence, and already the author wants the reader to feel sympathy for Gregor. This is no dream either, he is really a bug, and Kafka makes sure there is no confusion. This is just one of many examples that I will discuss where Kafka wants the reader to sympathize with Gregor.
From the beginning of The Metamorphosis Kafka offers a comical depiction of Gregor’s “squirming legs” (Kafka 13) and a body in which “he could not control” (7). Gregor’s initial reaction to this situation was the fact he was late to his dissatisfying job as a salesman, but Gregor knows that he has to continue his job in order to keep the expectation his family holds upon him to pay of the family’s everlasting debt. When Gregor’s family eventually realizes that Gregor is still lying in his bed, they are confused because they have expectations on Gregor that he will hold the family together by working. They know if Gregor was to quit his job there would be a great catastrophe since he is the glue to keeping their family out of debt. The communication between his family is quickly identified as meager and by talking to each other from the adjacent walls shows their disconnection with each other. Kafka introduces the family as lacking social skills in order to offer the reader to criticize and sympathize for Gregor’s family dynamics. Gregor’s manager makes an appearance quickly after experiencing the dysfunction within the fami...
Thirdly, he suffers isolation from the physical world, which he is no longer able to participate in due to his presence and lack of mobility. Lastly, he suffers isolation from other people around him, especially his family. By the end even his sister, Grete, the most compassionate member of the family, explanations that they should stop thoughtful of the creature as the person they knew. She says that “the fact that we’ve believed it so long is the root of our trouble” (Kafka 48), which can be taken to mean that at some point Gregor stopped being a person not only because of his entrance but since of his non-conformist actions. The beating he receives from his father shows the extent of the cruelty he endures, though his father knows that “family duty compulsory the conquest of disgust and the use of endurance, nothing but patience” (Kafka 36). The tragedy is that this alienation ends up killing Gregor, who “dies not as a vermin, but as a human being thinking of his family”. The transformation is an indication of the breakdown of Gregor’s psyche and alienation within his self. The reader is not told how the transformation
into three Roman-numbered parts, with each section having its own climax. A number of themes run through the story, but at the center are the family relationships affected by the great change in the story's protagonist, Gregor Samsa. Grete,Gregor’s sister, undergoes a transformation parallel to her brother’s.
Angus, Douglas. Kafka's Metamorphosis and "The Beauty and the Beast" Tale. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 53, No. 1. Jan., 1954, pp. 69-71. Print.
Conrad changes the environment to cause his protagonist struggles, and Kafka does the same but through internal contrasts. Kafka’s transformation of Gregor into a disgusting vermin causes doubt within him. These doubts place his family in a position where they lose any love and care they ever had in their son. On what should have been a normal morning, Gregor awoke and “found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin” (Kafka 3). Gregor's surreal transformation forces him to doubt and deny anything happening around him.
People want their family to love and support them during times of need, but if they are unable to develop this bond with their family members, they tend to feel alone and depressed. In the novel The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Kafka describes the theme of alienation and its negative effect on people and their relationships with the people around them. This theme can be shown through Gregor Samsa, the main character in The Metamorphosis. After Gregor’s metamorphosis, or transformation, he is turned from a human being into a giant bug which makes him more and more distant from the people in his life. The alienation that Gregor experiences results in his eventual downfall, which could and would happen to anyone else who becomes estranged from the people around them. Gregor’s alienation and its effect on his relationship with his family can be shown through his lack of willing interaction with his family members due to his inability to communicate to them, the huge burden he puts on the family after his metamorphosis, and his family’s hope to get rid of him because he is not who he was before.
The Metamorphosis is said to be one of Franz Kafka's best works of literature. It shows the difficulties of living in a modern society and the struggle for acceptance of others when in a time of need. In this novel Kafka directly reflects upon many of the negative aspects of his personal life, both mentally and physically. The relationship between Gregor and his father is in many ways similar to Franz and his father Herrman. The Metamorphosis also shows resemblance to some of Kafka's diary entries that depict him imagining his own extinction by dozens of elaborated methods. This paper will look into the text to show how this is a story about the author's personal life portrayed through his dream-like fantasies.
Setting is an important part of any novel. It uses the surrounding of the world to move the plot forward by setting the boundaries by which the world lives. In The Metamorphosis, Kafka uses the setting to create a world that mirrors the perspective of Gregor’s new found form. By using this perspective to establish the boundaries of the world, Kafka sets up the world in which Gregor lives as one that is completely enveloped in Gregor’s transformation. To do this effectively, Kafka shrinks the world of Gregor from one in which he travels to one in which his entire world is a single apartment. This shrinking allows Kafka to make a microcosm of surreal reality. In creating the microcosm, Kafka uses the newfound smallness of Gregor’s world to create a claustrophobic and almost boring setting. This type of setting helps to express Gregor’s new self.
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. 1st ed. Translated by Stanley Appelbaum. New York: Dover Publications, 1996.
Kafka, Franz. "The Metamorphosis". The Metamorphosis. Trans. Donna Freed and Ed. George Stade. New York: Barnes and Nobles, 2003.
As Gregor peers out from his room, he looks at the opposite wall. There hung a photograph of Gregor from his time in the military service as a lieutenant. The picture of Gregor in the living room is a shell of what he used to be. Since the time of his service, Gregor has changed from a happy, carefree man, to a depressed, isolated man, to a monstrous bug that is even more of a misunderstood, lonely
New York: Vintage International, 1988. Print. Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Trans.