Introduction
Metamorphosis is a work in which an exciting storyline develops from the beginning. The protagonist, Gregor, wakes up in the morning and finds that he has turned into an insect with insect legs, scales, and a shell-like back. Moreover, Gregor has to come to terms with this situation and adapt again to the conditions of life: it is not easy to roll over from his back to his insect legs, it is difficult to overcome the distance to the kitchen from the bedroom, and Gregor is often wholly unable to control his body freely and correctly. However, the most exciting thing is that the hero’s mind and thoughts remain the same: not to be late for work, not miss an important meeting, and not upset the family. Here is a work in which, on a simple plot, Kafka showed that there is a person.
Biographical criticism is a form of literary criticism that analyzes a writer’s biography to show the relationship between the author’s life and his literary works. Like any critical methodology, biographical criticism can be used circumspectly and astutely or as a superficial way to understand a literary work on its terms. The theory of biographical criticism is best suited to the analysis of Kafka’s Metamorphosis for several reasons. As described below, this work can be considered autobiographical since it has many interweaves with the life of Kafka. The work reflects his relationship with his family, alienation, and responsibility by describing the protagonist’s life, Gregor Samsa. There are so many interlacings in the work that if one discards the concept of a giant insect, there will be a feeling of reading the author’s biography. An analysis of Kafka’s Metamorphosis based on biographical criticism will highlight the main themes of reflection on Kafka’s family relations, alienation, and episodic incidents from the author’s life.
Reflection on Kafka’s Family Relations
Kafka was the eldest of six siblings and the only boy. From a young age, he knew he was interested in writing and art, which his father did not like. Throughout his life, he maintained a tense relationship with his father. Many critics have compared their real-life connection to the one played out between Gregor and his father in Metamorphosis (Baldwin, “Absurdism and Franz Kafka”). His complex relationship with occupies an essential place in Kafka’s biography with his father. It was these relationships that largely shaped the tragic worldview of the writer. Although Kafka’s father was stocky and not yet sixty, no one was allowed to excite him (Stach 22). In all sources, Kafka’s father is described as a callous man, unlike the only son, for whom his father had high hopes. The difference in their characters is intertwined with the difference in the characters of the son and father in Metamorphosis (Stach 115). Therefore, one can assume that the image of the protagonist Gregor Samsa is based on the author himself.
Autobiography is one of the features of Franz Kafka’s prose, which the writer himself fully realized. The author touches upon the problems of selflessness, workaholism, and self-sacrifice. The parasitic insect in Metamorphosis can be seen as a metaphor for the writer’s guilt before his father and family, a clear sense of his uselessness and insignificance. It becomes more accessible for the family to ignore Gregor’s existence than to continue caring for him (Baldwin, “The Metamorphosis Historical Context”). Kafka felt guilty before his family because he did not live up to the hopes placed on him, as on his only son.
Although he excelled in literature, his family wanted him to work at a regular job because, at all times, family members received the work of people of art with hostility. His thoughts began as fantasies of submission, smallness, and inferiority; he accepted them, recast them in symbolic form, and made stories out of them (Stach 275). Such distrust of Kafka caused him an inferiority complex – even succeeding in writing did not please him.
In addition, it is worth noting that the writer’s father worked as a traveling salesman before becoming the owner of a haberdashery store. As mentioned above, Kafka Sr. saw his son solely as the heir to the family business. The author of the novel The Metamorphosis tried in every possible way to comply with his father’s wishes. Kafka spent time as a lawyer in the insurance department among other lawyers, insurance experts, and businessmen (Stach 30). Perhaps that is why, under the influence of guilt before his father, he chose the profession of a lawyer, in which he had no genuine interest. These autobiographical details embody the motif of existential guilt in the short story.
Theme of Alienation
Gregor Samsa appears to readers as a pitiful creature, a shame, and a torment for a family that does not know what to do with him. One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he was transformed into horrible vermin in his bed (Kafka 3). Interestingly, he is not horrified by his transformation. Having survived the first bewilderment, he tries to adapt to his new state. So is his family, who, after the first shock of what happened, is trying to adapt to this. Gregor’s transformation brings a series of emotional transitions and obstacles he has to overcome (Baldwin, “The Metamorphosis Themes and Analysis”). Moreover, the death of the beetle son is perceived even with noticeable relief. An incredibly bleak allegory comes to the fore: waking up, a person discovers his complete, absolute loneliness and alienation, clearly expressed even outwardly – through an appearance that has ceased to be like a human. Thus, Kafka conveys the spiritual isolation of his hero through an incredible, disgusting metamorphosis of his appearance.
According to Kafka, the content of alienation lies in the tragedy of the eternal loneliness of a person unable to get used to the world. This is the abstract idea of fatal alienation, alienation in general, which cannot be eliminated under any circumstances. The inevitability of the tragic loneliness of the individual is the leitmotif of Kafka’s Metamorphosis because he very keenly perceived and experienced the alienation of the world of profit and cleansing that surrounded him. The whole work of Franz Kafka can be called one big essay about fear, about the state of a human being mutilated by a hostile civilization, doomed in any attempt to get to the Law to achieve justice, even if he shows activity. Out of this psychology of fear grows a philosophy of human existence, standing outside politics and class theories. In his artistic images, Kafka recreated humanity’s universal lack of freedom, entangled in social, ideological, psychological, and moral chains.
The surname Samsa is not accidental either – it is derived from the Czech samota, osamělost, which means loneliness. Kafka emphasizes the hero’s alienation from the family, indirectly retelling the events that preceded the transformation. Gregor has been working as a traveling salesman for five years; he is rarely at home, spending his time on the road (Kafka 3). However, returning home after a long absence, he sits at the table, studying the train schedule. The passage room, where the character lives between business trips, shows the depth of his loneliness among loved ones, with whom the spiritual connection has long been lost. The most terrible thing in all the feelings that the author conveys through his work lies in the autobiographical nature of the work. This speaks of the torment experienced by Kafka in his life, reflected in the image of Gregor Samsa.
Episodic Incidents from the Life of the Author
Another creatively transformed autobiographical detail in the novel The Metamorphosis is the room in which Gregor Samsa lives, located between the living room and the sister’s room. The novel’s author creating this literary text lived in the passage room between the living room and the parent’s bedroom (Kafka and Bauer). However, in the short story, this episode of personal experience becomes an artistic element, again revealing the theme of alienation. By placing Gregor in a walk-through room, the family demonstrates their consumer attitude towards him and oversees that he performs his work duties.
In one of the final episodes of The Metamorphosis, another artistic detail appears, connected with the author’s personal experience. After the death of Gregor, the insect, the father expels three tenants from the house who rented a room from the Samsa family. As the former guests make their way down the stairs, they meet the butcher’s assistant, who comes up with a basket on his head. This character also emerges from the personal experience of Franz Kafka. In a letter to Felicia Bauer dated October 24, 1912, he wrote that; in the morning at the entrance, a butcher’s apprentice with a tray ran into him, the wooden corner of which he still quite painfully felt under his left eye.
The existential crime committed by Gregor is an unlived life and an unrealized talent invested in it by the Creator. Gregor was endowed with the gift of an artist who turned out to be non-embodied. From the point of view of Christian ethics, a person at birth receives not only a soul but also a set of spiritual abilities, developing which he continues the work of God on earth. Gregor could not realize this divine plan; he was not worthy of the title of a man, so an unknown force gave him that physical form that corresponds to his inner appearance. Here one can see another correspondence with the life of Kafka, apart from the fact that he was still able to realize his talent as a writer, although he was recognized after his death, as is often the case.
Conclusion
The short story Metamorphosis is a complex artistic unity in which the autobiographical becomes universal. Franz Kafka used the images and situations of his personal experience and, having creatively reworked them filled them with universal content. Psychological trauma and everyday situations in the world of his prose turned into deep artistic images that can be read from the point of view of a variety of interpretations.
Works Cited
Baldwin, Emma “Absurdism and Franz Kafka” Book Analysis. Web.
Baldwin, Emma “The Metamorphosis Historical Context” Book Analysis, Web.
Baldwin, Emma “The Metamorphosis Themes and Analysis” Book Analysis. Web.
Kafka, Franz. Metamorphosis. Penguin Classics, 2016.
Kafka, Franz and Bauer, Felice. Letters to Felice. Schocken Books, 1973.
Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Decisive Years. Translated by Shelley Frisch. Princeton UP, 2021.