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L.A. II Honors Shawn Mauinatu Essay Period 2 Mr. Zwart Metamorphosis “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin” (Kafka 3).Within this framework of realism and deliberate distortion Kafka’s fiction evolves as a problem solving activity. The Metamorphosis is a thrilling novel that shows the way dreams can come true. Samsa (Kafka) is a character whose whole life has been filled with disappointments and many put downs. He believes that humans are trapped in a hopeless world and the only escape is death. The story tells us and show’s that man’s anxiety in a hostile dehumanized world. Samsa one morning is confronted by a world of impossible dimensions and he cannot do anything about it except for living a lifestyle as a roach in filth, dirtiness, and unhappiness. Kafka recognized that in the ordinary course of life we are blind to see these puzzles because we are unaware. When samsa is transformed into a roach he cannot do nothing about it but test it; he has to investigate the effects of this “test” and his own capacity for understanding. Each fateful confrontation of the antagonists, self and world, brings with it hosts of mutually exclusive, indeed, paradoxical relations. From this point on Kafka follows all leads with rigorous logic. Each day as samsa gets fed he starts to realize that he is not going to have his favorite meals any more. Instead he has to eat like a vermin and live like a vermin. He was only eating at certain parts of the day when his parents were not present. “ This then was the way Gregor was fed each day, once in the morning, when his parents and the maid were still asleep, and a second time in the afternoon after everyone had had dinner, for then his parents took a short nap again, and the maid could be sent out by his sister on some errand” (Kafka 24). The objective author-observer introduces his character into a carefully specified world. Keeping all elements constant, he then observes his character’s adjustments to a particular change. The book illustrates this manner most clearly. The significant shift of course is Gregor’s awakening in the shape of a stag-beetle. The story develops all consequent changes in both the hero and the world. The hero’s transformation and the change in his relations to the world involve significant cognitive changes. Kafka’s way of exploring the paradoxes Gregor confronts is therefore at first epistemological that is, it is concerned with different ways of knowing reality, of exploring the shifting relations between self and world. From Gregor’s point of view, the tragedy of “The Metamorphosis” consists in the self’s gradual reduction to its most vital center- its self consciousness. In two stages a more superficial change in spatial relations and a more central change in consciousness of time. Gregor is finally reduced to a mere speck of self awareness which is ultimately extinguished. If Gregor’s end is marked by the true and final transformation of the hero from bondage of him, the family we infer had been similarly constricted and set free. In this way, relations constantly shift, unite, and contrast with one another. The self and the various figures representing the world are equally important and the author focuses on them simultaneously. For this reason, the shift in the point of view to the family is a perfectly defensible way of concluding the story. Gregor’s extinction has in the end become the family’s liberation. Since the self has been obliterated by the world the emphasis must now be placed upon the world for its figures have gained at last the liberation the hero had sought. Grete’s yawn of freedom neatly ties the story to the transformation of the beginning. Yet this very conclusion has pushed us to the point of ludicrousness. Reached by the simultaneous creation and dislocation of a particular world; in which contradictory solutions like constriction and freedom obliteration and awareness of existence, equally apply.