The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Other Works by Franz Kafka
The Trial
The Castle
Amerika
The Metamorphosis
And Other Stories
Franz Kafka
Contents
Introduction
The Metamorphosis
The Judgment
The Stoker: A Fragment
A Country Doctor
In The Penal Colony
A Hunger Artist
An Old Leaf
A Message from the Emperor
Before the Law
Josephine the Singer, Or The Mouse People
Translator’s Afterword
About the Author
Introduction
DESCRIBING A PHOTOGRAPH OF Kafka, Thomas Mann, one of his foremost advocates, remarked that his eyes were dreamy but also penetrating. This is not a surprising observation, considering Kafka’s deep interest in his own dreams. Mann’s description suggests a kind of sleeping-waking state where the dream not only still controls its special reality but strongly influences that other reality to which it must inevitably yield. It was Max Brod, Kafka’s close friend and best-known biographer, who once commented that the only thing that seemed to matter to Kafka was his dreams—a fact that becomes patently evident to anyone who takes the time to skim through his diaries. Those addicted to dreams, like many of the characters that people Kafka’s works—like Kafka himself by his own admission—are often unfit for life. He succeeded, managing well as a writer who mined his dreams to enrich the “other” or real world, and yet failed on a personal level in that public reality.
Throughout most of his literary career, Kafka remained a writer of dream-narratives. Dreams, he felt, contained the fundamental truth about the self: They were the essential instrument in the composition of many of his stories. But, though they are dream-influenced, his writings are far from mere phantasmagoric entertainments. They persuade the reader to question—long after a story has been read—his or her own existence in the light of the uncanny experiences the story presents. The reader can often, and with surprising ease, hear and see himself in Kafka’s tales. One of Kafka’s incomparable gifts is his ability to couple his own objectivity as a writer with a deep and sympathetic awareness of the besieged character’s mentality. This riveting technique allows the reader of these dream-narratives, while vicariously sharing the character’s sense of alienation or humiliation, to maintain a sharp and critical awareness of the oppressive realities that rule the waking state—those icons of the establishment such as bosses, senators, military officers, and tyrannical fathers.
At one point in his career, Kafka allegedly said: “…to hell with psychology.” (“Never again psychology!” is the 93rd aphorism in his Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way, meaning that if one is patient enough, the world will reveal itself as it really is without probing or analysis, because it is the world’s nature to do so.) Yet it can’t be denied that we sense something unmistakably Freudian in the father-son elements contained in many of his stories. In his handling of these conflicts, however, as in “The Judgment” (which he wrote on the eve of the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, also known in Hebrew as Yo ha-Din, the Day of Judgment), Kafka does not round off these elements in a Freudian sense; instead, he has them backfire. The oppressor-father, deposed temporarily, regains his position, often to the humiliation and outright defeat of the son as would-be usurper. This seemingly senile misfit of a father recoils when his son suggests an alteration to the old man’s lifestyle, then regains his “rightful” position by precipitating his son’s suicide. In “The Metamorphosis,” the patriarchal Samsa family resumes its “normal” functioning soon after Gregor’s pitiable death. It is as if Oedipal guilt is too weighty a responsibility for Kafka, the dream-writer, to willfully assume, even in the guise of his characters. So-called familial normalcy is also put on trial as Kafka exposes the exploitative nature of the patriarchal version of this system: With Gregor no longer in the picture, Herr Samsa turns to his budding daughter as a source of the family’s future comfort.
To take this a step further, Kafka’s stories often wind up condoning what they set out to defy. It is this respect and acceptance of madness-as-norm by his doomed characters that make his stories so seductive and unforgettable. “Contradiction is life, no matter what is hoped,” his stories seem to declare. Working to much the same effect is the norm-as-madness reversal that Kafka employs with such remarkable success in “In the Penal Colony.” Here, the fanatic, hard-line officer, rather than yield to the new, more lenient order that is fast becoming the law, prefers to confound that order by sacrificing himself to an intricate execution machine employed by the old regime—the former norm. Guided by some impulse to self-destruct, the officer, as if in thrall, carries out this act of his own volition and by his own hand. Although astounded by the officer’s complete madness, the traveler-narrator, who must witness this gruesome death, holds an honest respect for him…for the suicide’s belief in the logic of his foolish act.