Narrative Modes In The Metamorphosis By Franz Kafka

The narration modes found in a novel can be difficult to sustain in a film. The novels chosen for the purpose of this research have different modes of narration. However, many of these narrative processes may be omitted in the adaptation process of a film. Let us look at the narration in each of the novels. In The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, the narrator is an omniscient person who recounts the story in a very monotonous tone which is very neutral. The narrator speaks in a third person and focusses on the thoughts, emotions and feelings of Gregor Samsa. The narrator describes everything from the point of view of Gregor Samsa and what he sees, feels, thinks, hears and perceives. In Siddhartha too, a third person omniscient narrator describes

(Cook) In a film, one shot and then consecutively on sees the next shot on screen. They may have been filmed on two different occasions but editing help to glue them together. Many shots together make a scene. When many scenes come together, it make a film. Therefore eliciting meaning from all of these hundreds of shots such that the scene looks continuous and arranging the scenes in the film such that it lends meaning to the film is not short of an art. A beautiful example of this placement of character is that, when a character’s movement on screen is in upward direction, it shows power and strength, but a downward movement of a character shows weakness and lack of power. (Giannetti, Understanding Movies) The coming together of the space in which a character

Each time a scene is visualized, it narrows down the open-ended characters, objects, landscapes, created by the book and imagined by the reader in his mind forming concrete and definite images. The character added to the places, objects, moments and everything that is there in a book, is open to various decoding possibilities of imagining. But a film transmits these in a pre-defined way. The insights of theories of Bakhtin, intertextuality, deconstruction, reception theory, cultural studies, narratology, or performance theory might have relevance to adaptation studies, these connections have only begun to be made. The theoretical impasse in narrative adaptation studies is represented by an ongoing dominance that is usually referred to as “fidelity discourse”. This is a common way of determining the worth of an adaptation work’s success in terms of its faithfulness or closeness to the ‘original’. To be able to understand an adapted film from a point of view of a piece of art is only possible when we distance ourselves from the literary text. It is difficult to watch a cinematic version on screen of the books we have loved and internalized so intimately and made them an integral part of our imagination. When we read a book, it has the ability to take us into a magic realm, into an atmosphere where all our senses are embraced. So when