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Violence In Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis is the story of a commercial traveler, Gregor Samsa,

that one morning awoke turned into a gigantic insect. It is no dream

but, simply and plainly, a real metamorphosis with no rhetoric in

between. Facing this incredible fact, Kafka does not do any realistic

concessions and keeps the new condition of the character to the end.

That makes of The metamorphosis a hard work of fiction, in the way of

Odyssey (with which, besides, it is closely related) or in the way of

the Medieval fairy tales, specially those in which the wicked witch

turns The Prince Charming into a hideous animal.

>From the other side, the work, that belongs to a trilogy about marriage

in relation to the individual, the family and the so-ciety written by

Kafka, has a highly autobiographical contain. In The Judgment the

subject is the engagement assumed as a treason to the literary calling;

in The metamorphosis there is a view of marriage and family relations

from a masochistic and incestuous perspective; in The Trial, it is the

settlement of accounts, related with the incapacity of accomplishing the

acquired compro-mises, according to an unwritten law, he must pay. In

the three cases, the story ends with the protagonist's death.

The Metamorphosis is built on a fiction level with two faces, Crime and

Punishment by Dostoevsky and Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,

superposed in a way they get in contact with a real level with two faces

too, the family relations and his dreams of Felice. By the merging of

theses two levels, Kafka gets a fantastic reality which allows him to

express his deepest dreams and desires in relation with marriage and sex

in a poetic language that turns The Metamorphosis into a classic of

erotism, aspect not considered until now. (Such a pleiad, Kafka, Sacher-

Masoch and Dostoesky, met in The Metamorphosis turns into a height of...