Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Barnes & Noble Classics
Pages
191
Description
Franz Kafka's nightmarish novels and short stories have come to symbolize modern man's anxiety and alienation in a bizarre, hostile, and dehumanized world. This vision is most fully realized in Kafka's masterpiece, "The Metamorphosis," a story that is both harrowing and amusing, and a landmark of modern literature. Bringing together some of Kafka's finest work, this collection demonstrates the richness and variety of the author's artistry. "The Judgment," which Kafka considered to be his decisive breakthrough, and "The Stoker," which became the first chapter of his novel "Amerika, are here included. These two, along with "The Metamorphosis," form a suite of stories Kafka referred to as "The Sons," and they collectively present a devastating portrait of the modern family. Jason Baker is a writer of short stories living in Brooklyn, New York.… (more)
Description
Includes the following short stories:
The Metamorphosis
The judgement
The stoker
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.
The Metamorphosis
The judgement
The stoker
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.
Collection
Language
Original language
German
Original publication date
1913 - 1924 (original stories)
1996 (English: Donna Freed)
Physical description
191 p.; 8 inches
ISBN
1593080298 / 9781593080297
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User reviews
LibraryThing member ChocolateMuse
These are my thoughts on The Metamorphosis only, not the other stories in the collection.
I was drawn to the story after finding its first few lines quoted in a book called The Body Silent by Robert Murphy - which is an anthropologist's record of his own descent into paraplegia and later
This coloured my reading of The Metamorphosis very much - I couldn't help seeing the first two thirds of this story as an analogy for disability. I'm glad I did - if it wasn't for this angle, I would have probably only seen it as a strange, nightmarish, and quite random story about a person turning into a giant bug. Of course there are other analogies - not least the feeling of essential isolation and being different from everyone else that probably everyone has to some extent… but it's hard to relate this to something so exaggerated as Kafka's story of poor Gregor.
Physical disability is a hard thing to discuss in brutal, factual terms - particularly the social effects of it. But having read Murphy's book, and Gossman's little classic Stigma, I do think that Kafka gives the reader a good insight into what it feels like to have a body that won't do what you want it to do; which is awkward and easily damaged; and which causes fear and repulsion in others, even those like Gregor's sister, who don't at all want to be repelled or frightened by it. The reactions of each family member and the peripheral other characters, as well as that of Gregor himself (particularly his sense of being useless and not a part of life any more), are all different, and all, in my opinion, have something to tell us about the way people (ourselves included) react to someone who is damaged or different - and particularly someone who can't communicate.
I'm not sure how the last third of the book fits into this though. I think at a certain, noticeable point in the story the disability angle dissipates, and instead focuses on Gregor's transition from human-in-bug-body into an animal. (This is not the actual ending, and I don't think it's a spoiler). The details of this change are wonderfully done, from the changes in people's attitudes towards him, to his own change of attitude towards himself.
This is my first foray into Kafka, though I read Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle last year, and Murakami draws freely from Kafka's style. I now have a better understanding of what people mean by 'kafkaesque' - a situation just like a nightmare, where wildly improbable things happen as a matter of course, and there's a sense of inescapability, and a matter-of-fact acceptance of odd and terrible things. It's a very strange book, darkly funny in places, and not without real pathos. The language is simple and packs a punch - I read the translation by Donna Freed. It's a fascinating read, of a length probably best described as a long short story.
****I just want to add a spoiler here, don't read on if you haven't read the book*******
It's fascinating the way our sympathies change throughout the story. At the beginning, when Gregor is still a normal person trapped in the bug's body, the wound on his side caused by his scraping on the door is a pain we almost feel ourselves - a horrible and sad thing. But later, when he crawls out covered in dust and that strange rotten apple, we just see him as a kind of cockroach. We still know what he's thinking, the story is still told mainly from his point of view - but our sympathies towards him have undergone a change because somewhere along the way he's lost his humanity. And once he's dead - a flat dead body of a verminous bug, we are not even sad, but feel the relief almost as his family does - and yet we know more about what he felt and understood than the family did, and we wonder at our own lack of sympathy.
I was drawn to the story after finding its first few lines quoted in a book called The Body Silent by Robert Murphy - which is an anthropologist's record of his own descent into paraplegia and later
Show More
quadriplegia due to an inoperable spinal tumour: a sociological study of physical disability, as experienced from the inside. This coloured my reading of The Metamorphosis very much - I couldn't help seeing the first two thirds of this story as an analogy for disability. I'm glad I did - if it wasn't for this angle, I would have probably only seen it as a strange, nightmarish, and quite random story about a person turning into a giant bug. Of course there are other analogies - not least the feeling of essential isolation and being different from everyone else that probably everyone has to some extent… but it's hard to relate this to something so exaggerated as Kafka's story of poor Gregor.
Physical disability is a hard thing to discuss in brutal, factual terms - particularly the social effects of it. But having read Murphy's book, and Gossman's little classic Stigma, I do think that Kafka gives the reader a good insight into what it feels like to have a body that won't do what you want it to do; which is awkward and easily damaged; and which causes fear and repulsion in others, even those like Gregor's sister, who don't at all want to be repelled or frightened by it. The reactions of each family member and the peripheral other characters, as well as that of Gregor himself (particularly his sense of being useless and not a part of life any more), are all different, and all, in my opinion, have something to tell us about the way people (ourselves included) react to someone who is damaged or different - and particularly someone who can't communicate.
I'm not sure how the last third of the book fits into this though. I think at a certain, noticeable point in the story the disability angle dissipates, and instead focuses on Gregor's transition from human-in-bug-body into an animal. (This is not the actual ending, and I don't think it's a spoiler). The details of this change are wonderfully done, from the changes in people's attitudes towards him, to his own change of attitude towards himself.
This is my first foray into Kafka, though I read Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle last year, and Murakami draws freely from Kafka's style. I now have a better understanding of what people mean by 'kafkaesque' - a situation just like a nightmare, where wildly improbable things happen as a matter of course, and there's a sense of inescapability, and a matter-of-fact acceptance of odd and terrible things. It's a very strange book, darkly funny in places, and not without real pathos. The language is simple and packs a punch - I read the translation by Donna Freed. It's a fascinating read, of a length probably best described as a long short story.
****I just want to add a spoiler here, don't read on if you haven't read the book*******
It's fascinating the way our sympathies change throughout the story. At the beginning, when Gregor is still a normal person trapped in the bug's body, the wound on his side caused by his scraping on the door is a pain we almost feel ourselves - a horrible and sad thing. But later, when he crawls out covered in dust and that strange rotten apple, we just see him as a kind of cockroach. We still know what he's thinking, the story is still told mainly from his point of view - but our sympathies towards him have undergone a change because somewhere along the way he's lost his humanity. And once he's dead - a flat dead body of a verminous bug, we are not even sad, but feel the relief almost as his family does - and yet we know more about what he felt and understood than the family did, and we wonder at our own lack of sympathy.
Show Less
LibraryThing member WilfGehlen
Metamorphosis / Winter of our discontent / Metempsychosis
Metamorphosis, or Why a Bug?
Gregor Samsa awoke one morning as a bug. "What has happened to me?" he thought. And that is the last he thought of how he arrived at his predicament. He acts throughout the story as a human Gregor adapting to life
Is Nietzche engaging in a thought experiment on personal continuity in Metamorphosis? What of Gregor is in this bug? He has a bug body, he must have a bug brain to be able to image through bug eyes, to move bug legs. But he has the consciousness of Gregor that initially externalizes itself outside the body, to talk, after a fashion, to stand and unlock the door, after a fashion. He soon loses the ability to talk and ceases to be Gregor to his family. But he has an immensely strong identity, rooted in providing for his family, and never ceases to be Gregor to himself until his death.
But why a bug? Others have made the connection between Samsa and Samsara, the Buddhist wheel of life. According to Samsara, one is reborn an animal when one's human life is centered on survival and self-preservation. Gregor's life is centered on his hated job as traveling salesman, which he keeps only to provide for his family.
Beyond that, the bug is absurd and creates a comical scene when, for instance, the head clerk flees down the stairs to escape this monstrosity. Gregor never ascribes this flight and fright to his own appearance, heightening the humor. None of us are bugs, though, and never expect to become one. But each of us could be exposed to a similar alienation, separation, isolation. Consider yourself developing a motor neural disease, confined to a wheelchair, losing gross motor functionality, the ability to speak. Like Gregor, you would have trouble opening doors, even moving through some doorways, communicating with your family. Then you regress, confined to bed, breathing through a tube, externally comatose but fully conscious. The situation in reality is not far removed from the absurd.
We likely will not develop such a disease, but we can still experience some form of alienation. Are we also trapped in a job because of circumstance? Metamorphosis holds out hope that a situation can improve even when it appears hopeless. The Samsa family can no longer depend on Gregor's salary, they must work themselves, expand beyond the confines of their home. They find that they are quite capable and soon entertain thoughts of a happy future, a possible husband for Gregor's sister Grete. All are transformed through Gregor's metamorphosis, but a slightly less absurd metamorphosis might also have achieved a happy result. Gregor could simply have emigrated to Amerika, leaving his family to their own devices. Perhaps not morally defensible at some level, but better to feel your humanity than to live and die like a bug.
Metamorphosis, or Why a Bug?
Gregor Samsa awoke one morning as a bug. "What has happened to me?" he thought. And that is the last he thought of how he arrived at his predicament. He acts throughout the story as a human Gregor adapting to life
Show More
in a bug's body.Is Nietzche engaging in a thought experiment on personal continuity in Metamorphosis? What of Gregor is in this bug? He has a bug body, he must have a bug brain to be able to image through bug eyes, to move bug legs. But he has the consciousness of Gregor that initially externalizes itself outside the body, to talk, after a fashion, to stand and unlock the door, after a fashion. He soon loses the ability to talk and ceases to be Gregor to his family. But he has an immensely strong identity, rooted in providing for his family, and never ceases to be Gregor to himself until his death.
But why a bug? Others have made the connection between Samsa and Samsara, the Buddhist wheel of life. According to Samsara, one is reborn an animal when one's human life is centered on survival and self-preservation. Gregor's life is centered on his hated job as traveling salesman, which he keeps only to provide for his family.
Beyond that, the bug is absurd and creates a comical scene when, for instance, the head clerk flees down the stairs to escape this monstrosity. Gregor never ascribes this flight and fright to his own appearance, heightening the humor. None of us are bugs, though, and never expect to become one. But each of us could be exposed to a similar alienation, separation, isolation. Consider yourself developing a motor neural disease, confined to a wheelchair, losing gross motor functionality, the ability to speak. Like Gregor, you would have trouble opening doors, even moving through some doorways, communicating with your family. Then you regress, confined to bed, breathing through a tube, externally comatose but fully conscious. The situation in reality is not far removed from the absurd.
We likely will not develop such a disease, but we can still experience some form of alienation. Are we also trapped in a job because of circumstance? Metamorphosis holds out hope that a situation can improve even when it appears hopeless. The Samsa family can no longer depend on Gregor's salary, they must work themselves, expand beyond the confines of their home. They find that they are quite capable and soon entertain thoughts of a happy future, a possible husband for Gregor's sister Grete. All are transformed through Gregor's metamorphosis, but a slightly less absurd metamorphosis might also have achieved a happy result. Gregor could simply have emigrated to Amerika, leaving his family to their own devices. Perhaps not morally defensible at some level, but better to feel your humanity than to live and die like a bug.
Show Less
LibraryThing member JennyElizabeth
You gotta love Kafka's combos of human and animal (and insect) existence... I think, perhaps the most disturbing but rivetting story was "In the Penal Colony", but my favorite whimsy story was "Address to the Academy."
LibraryThing member jackichan
Really a nice change of pace from so many other works where the plot is of high importance. Kafka is more like a fine meal; the point is not to finish the meal, but rather to enjoy the meal as you are consuming it.
All of the stories are morbid and strange, enjoyable nonetheless. His grasp on
All of the stories are morbid and strange, enjoyable nonetheless. His grasp on
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language and his focus on deeper meaning and metaphors(no pun intended)is really quite impressive. Show Less
LibraryThing member akblanchard
In this edition, Kafka's classic novella about a man who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant bug is accompanied by several short stories that repeat the themes of alienation, dehumanization, and the difficulty of being an artist in an uncomprehending world. Jason Baker's
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introduction, which focuses on Kafka's troubled relationship with his father, is helpful, as is Donna Freed's translator's note which explains the difficulties of interpreting Kafka for a modern American audience without losing the flavor of the original German prose. If you are going to read Kafka for the first time, this is a solid edition to start with. Show Less
LibraryThing member fancypengy
The Metamorphosis and In The Penal Colony were my favorites- I'm sad to read people saying ITPC was boring, I can't even fathom not being intrigued and a little moved by that story.
Call number
FIC A4 Kaf