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    Metamorphosis (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    Metamorphosis (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    Metamorphosis (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    Ebook131 pages2 hours

    Metamorphosis (MAXNotes Literature Guides)

    By Stanley Taikeff

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    About this ebook

    MAXnotes offer a fresh look at masterpieces of literature, presented in a lively and interesting fashion. Written by literary experts who currently teach the subject, MAXnotes will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of the work. MAXnotes are designed to stimulate independent thought about the literary work by raising various issues and thought-provoking ideas and questions. MAXnotes cover the essentials of what one should know about each work, including an overall summary, character lists, an explanation and discussion of the plot, the work's historical context, illustrations to convey the mood of the work, and a biography of the author. Each chapter is individually summarized and analyzed, and has study questions and answers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResearch & Education Association
    Release dateJan 1, 2013
    ISBN9780738673363
    Metamorphosis (MAXNotes Literature Guides)

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      Metamorphosis (MAXNotes Literature Guides) - Stanley Taikeff

      Bibliography

      SECTION ONE

      Introduction

      The Life and Work of Franz Kafka

      The oldest of six children, Franz Kafka was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia on July 3,1883, the son of prosperous, middle-class parents, Hermann and Julie Löwy. Kafka’s childhood and adolescence were dominated by his father, a successful merchant who owned a dry goods business. Kafka’s father’s powerful influence and often tyrannical presence marked Kafka’s life both as an artist and as a man. The struggle to free himself from his overbearing father found expression in his fiction as the shy, passive, sensitive victim who suffers and struggles against authoritarian forces and figures. In his Letter to His Father (1919), Kafka wrote: My writing was all about you.

      After completing his elementary and secondary education, Kafka graduated from the German University of Prague with a degree in law. Always an avid reader, Kafka was drawn to philosophy and literature, and he soon started to write his own sketches and stories. Among his favorite writers were Dickens, Goethe, Flaubert, Kleist, Thomas Mann, and the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, the founder of modern existentialism, a philosophy that emphasizes the individual as an agent responsible for his own choices in life.

      In 1902, Kafka met the writer Max Brod, who became his close friend, admirer, and biographer. The two young men shared a passion for literature, and they often traveled together in the early years of their friendship. In 1908, Kafka began working for the Workman’s Accident Insurance Company in Prague, a government job that would later provide him with material for two of his unfinished novels, The Trial (1915) and The Castle (1921).

      In 1912, an important year in Kafka’s life, Kafka met Felice Bauer. Kafka was engaged to her twice during a five-year period, but never married her. During this year, he also finished two important works, The Judgment and Metamorphosis. Both stories focus on the tortured, father–son relationship; in the latter story, the theme of the individual’s estrangement from society is given compelling, dramatic expression. This theme occupied Kafka throughout his life, and recurs throughout his mature fiction.

      The year 1919 saw three more important works: A Country Doctor, In the Penal Colony, and the autobiographical document Letter to His Father.

      In 1924, while receiving treatment for tuberculosis in Merano, Italy, Kafka met the married writer, Milena Jesenka, with whom he had an affair. In 1923, losing his battle with tuberculosis, Kafka met the 19-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman, Dora Dymant. Dora devoted herself completely to Kafka’s care and welfare, and they lived together in Berlin until Kafka’s death. He died on June 3, 1924 in Kierling, outside Vienna. He was buried alongside his parents in the Jewish cemetery of Prague-Straschnitz. His three sisters all perished in Hitler’s concentration camps.

      Kafka’s influence on twentieth-century literature is both profound and incalculable. The word Kafkaesque has passed into the literature to describe an unsettling, disorienting, nightmarish world that is at once both fearful and menacing in its ambiguity and complexity. His haunting, disturbing, and sometimes grotesque images, combined with his struggling but ultimately defeated heroes, defined an age wherein alienated man—the anti-hero—grappling with meaning and justice in an inscrutable world, is denied answers to both.

      Historical Background

      The years 1880–1914 (1914 marked the outbreak of World War I) were significant in terms of the changes taking place in the arts in Europe. Traditional artistic forms and structures in literature, painting, poetry, music, and the theatre were undergoing innovative, and in some cases, revolutionary change. Romanticism and naturalism in the fields of painting, music, and literature and realism in the theatre spawned other artistic movements: impressionism and cubism in painting, the atonal system in music, dadaism in poetry and art, and expressionism and absurdism in the theatre. Composers like Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schönberg, writers like James Joyce, Alfred Jarry, and Apollinaire, and painters like Henri Rousseau and Piet Mondrian were experimenting with conventional artistic forms and creating newer, more abstract and symbolic works of art. It was into this vital period of dramatic change in the arts that Franz Kafka was born.

      In 1883, the year of Kafka’s birth, modern Czechoslovakia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For Kafka, a Jew who wrote his stories and novels in German, living in Prague forced him into a certain kind of social and cultural isolation. He was not an observant, Orthodox Jew and was therefore estranged from his own people. And since he considered himself a German in language and culture, he was alienated from the Czech people, who comprised the majority of people living in the country. This sense of cultural and societal estrangement was keenly felt by Kafka and it influenced his thought and outlook and contributed to his artistic expression as a writer.

      At the age of 28, Kafka wrote in a letter, I am separated from all things by a hollow space, and I do not even reach to its boundaries. Prague—with its old, crooked streets and ancient, medieval buildings, with its diverse population of Czechs, Germans, Rumanians, and Jews—fed Kafka’s imagination from his birth to his death. It was into that hollow space that he placed his tormented, alienated characters.

      The theme of the artist as an outsider, cut off from every day reality to create his own transcendent reality, is seen in German literature from Goethe’s Tasso to Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger. Kafka’s own fiction continues in this tradition, but whereas Mann gives us a reality that is recognizable and familiar to us, Kafka’s world is more opaque, symbolic, and dream-like in quality, often defying interpretation itself. Like the hero K. of the novels The Trial and The Castle, we find ourselves struggling to gain a foothold in vastly unfamiliar territory that is both treacherous and terrifying to negotiate.

      Hermann Hesse, a German writer and contemporary of Kafka, called Kafka The uncrowned King of German prose. Kafka’s prose style shares the simplicity, clarity, and logic of other German writers, namely, the brothers Grimm and E.T.A. Hofmann. But Kafka’s art, with its emphasis on symbol and on the juxtaposition of the real and the fantastic, the rational and the irrational, the ordinary and the extraordinary is unmistakably modern in its sensibility, themes, and vision of the future.

      Master List of Characters

      Gregor Samsa—the protagonist or hero of the story.

      Mr. Samsa—the protagonist’s father; an old man, described as having bushy eyebrows and black eyes.

      Mrs. Samsa—the protagonist’s mother; she suffers from asthma and is anxious to please her husband.

      Grete—the protagonist’s younger sister; 17 years old, she plays the violin.

      Chief—the protagonist’s boss; although he is never seen in the story, he is much on Gregor’s mind in the early part of the story.

      Chief Clerk—a bureaucrat representing the Chief.

      Anna—the 16-year-old servant girl.

      Household Cook—the woman who asks to be dismissed from her job.

      Three Lodgers—the three bearded men who rent a room in the Samsa apartment.

      Cleaning Woman (Charwoman)—the woman who takes on the job of cleaning out the protagonist’s room in Part Three.

      Summary of the Novel

      Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, awakes one morning to find out that he has been transformed into a gigantic insect. From his bed, he looks around his

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