Franz Kafka led a very complex life in the short amount of time he lived. A lot of critics love to make the probably true personal connections between Gregor and Franz in “The Metamorphosis,” but these critics always seem to forget two pertinent facts in addition, the work was first drafted well before he had any symptoms of tuberculosis, and during the beginning of the war, several revisions were made to the work before Kafka released it. The idea that his experience with TB has to do with the book in any way, usually the primary argument of literary analysts who suggest this book is a portrayal of his own life, is very completely inaccurate.
These experts cite that the family construct of Gregor’s was similar to Kafka’s, and that both the character and author worked to pay off the debts of their fathers. Not only do they point out assumptions that aren’t true (Kafka’s father was not deep in debt), but they seem to ignore a simple fact about writing, whether it be fiction or nonfiction, that art often represents portions of the artist. We are told to “write what we know,” so that’s what Kafka did. In fact, it is entirely possible to say that this work is about his own life and the war concurrently. It is probably the more plausible of all theories regarding the allegories presented in his work.
Before diving headlong into deep analysis of “The Metamorphosis, as per request, the issue of war and the works of Wedekind and Kafka will be shortly addressed:
“The Metamorphosis” and “The Spring Awakening,” though not explicitly about war, have a foundation in the times and society revolving around the time of the Great War and regional German conflicts at the time these pieces were written. War is often used as a context in which to link pieces of work together. Without that given context, there were relatively few similarities between the work by Franz Kafka and Frank Wedekind, aside from the fact that their work is still enigmatic and beyond our times to this day.. Wedekind is a playwright who wrote one of the most obscene and explicit works to date. Kafka is a still very controversial and poorly understood artist, whose works have layers upon layers of allegories.
“The Spring Awakening” has literally nothing to do with the Great War, but was drafted during the time in which Germany was being unified and had some growing pains. It was only translated into English towards the end of the Great war, but the themes have much more to do with taboo sexuality. It is thrown into the context of World War 1 simply to show how evolved German society was. Even today, German society at the turn of the 19th Century is one of the most progressive cultures to have ever existed. The fact that a play like this would even be considered suggests this.
Its allusion to homosexual tendencies, coming of age sexuality, molestation, rape, suicide, and a plethora of other insanely vivid and nuanced topics would not be acceptable in today’s world. Yet, in the late 19th Century, there were gay bars, clubs that allowed for sado-masochism, sexual relations with younger partners, a very active drag queen community, etc. In the context of the wars that tore Germany apart over the following forty years after the play was written, it shows how much society, culture, and intellectual growth can be completely stunted or reversed entirely under the scorn of battle. This stunted growth is alluded to a lot in Kafka’s work.A great example of this is “The Metamorphosis.”
Because so many meanings can be appropriated to “The Metamorphosis,” this is a piece that is beyond worthy of a closer look. For 100 years, critics and fellow authors have angrily debated its meaning. Even suggesting that Kafka wrote only about his personal life experiences, and that any indication of a meaning of war, is a frequent firestarter for debate, not just when it comes to “The Metamorphosis,” but all of the work that Kafka debatably never wanted to be released. This ongoing debate is what makes Kafka such an enigmatic writer, and his work so enjoyable to pour over.
The most reasonable place to start is with Franz Kafka’s personal life. Throughout his childhood, Kafka was a small and often sick individual. He never played sports, and his well-to-do father instead chose to provide for a superior education for his son. Kafka was instructed in German, in Prague, a city not really tied down to a single language. It was considered sophisticated to speak German at the time Kafka was growing up, as its society was very advanced in the early 1900’s. In 1906, Kafka received a PhD, and writing was not his career. He worked for an accounting firm that took him across continental Europe during a time when political divisions were bubbling just beneath the surface.
Most of Kafka’s friends at the time recall him as being very pro-communist and anti-war. Others reported that he was anti-state, which would have been a complete contradiction to documentation that he attended rallies for the two former ideologies. Writing became more of a hobby for Kafka during the early 1910’s, something he would do as he traveled. His best friend noted how Kafka became more obsessed with the nationalist and socialist schisms that were forming between Western and Eastern Europe (Galinda, 2013). By 1915, he had decried his Jewish background in favor of more secular beliefs. This caused Kafka to lose many of his childhood friends. In 1916-1917, he started showing symptoms of esophageal and lung infection. It was originally diagnosed as bronchitis, and he spent the next three years believing it was nothing more than a chronic form of that disease. It was at this time that the first conclusive tests for TB were developed and widely used as a result of soldiers coming back from battle sick.
He was diagnosed conclusively with TB, and lived out the rest of his extremely short life in and out of sanitariums, writing several incomplete stories, but intimated the details to his best friend, Max Brod, of the narratives of several of those stories. At the time of Kafka’s death, his will came out, and he instructed Brod to burn all of his work. There is a lot of contention about the ethics of the decision to not burn his work, though Brod indicated to reporters and family that they would often joke about burning his work, and his will was only meant as a lasting inside joke.
It is not typical for an analysis of an author’s work to begin with a biography of the author, but then again, Kafka is not the typical author. He saw a little success in his works during his lifetime, but many of his works went decades without being taken seriously, because the plots didn’t seem to make sense, and the endings even less sense, to the people of the time. In a non-poetic way, Kafka’s work was political goth if the genre ever existed. His endings are more similar to Poe’s than any of his contemporaries, but with story-lines that seem simple enough. Morphology in art was not a rare occurrence at this time, but work still usually concluded in a satisfactory way, with a happy ending. Kafka’s works often ended in death, which made him stick out in a time after the gothic era, and before the work of authors like Ernest Hemingway.
It is very tempting to make what would seem to be direct connections between Kafka’s work and his own personal life. This is a misconception that some critics carry to this day. They claim that Kafka must be writing about his own family in “The Metamorphosis,” and that he is, in fact Gregor. Add in a nice little conjecture about how Kafka must have been lonely, and therefore was the man who woke up as an insect, polish it with assumptions about Kafka’s work, and we have a singular allegory for why this book was written.
The problem is, Kafka, was from a family of means. His father supported all his endeavors, and in fact helped to fund Kafka’s education, and provided his insistence to the dean of Franz’s university that he should be considered for PhD eligibility. In “The Metamorphosis,” there seems to be no love lost between the son and father. Gregor’s father left the entire family in debt, presumably due to mental illness, and was completely dependent upon Gregor to not only pay off the debt, but to provide for the entire family. This included paying for his younger sister’s education.
Kafka actually offers us a total paradox on this theme that should make it perfectly clear that he is not writing about any particular family,much less his own. Towards the beginning of the novella, we are led to think that it was completely Gregor’s ambition and the desire to benefit himself to move up in his station. It is not until later that the real reason for his working at a cruddy job has to do with paying off dad’s debt. Kafka had nothing to pay off. He was very proud of the work he did. Aside from this paradox, there is also the issue with a particular sibling, along with several friends of Kafka’s, that probably changed the trajectory of this story in his later revisions. His older brother had died in the war, and his friends were coming back as shells of the people they once were. This alienated Kafka, to see his friend’s come back from war with no personality left, almost as if they’re mere bugs. The war impacted Kafka personally on many levels.
As mentioned before, Kafka had been anti-war prior to the war itself occurring. What started out as a complete work of throwaway fiction for Kafka while he was riding a train through Germany suddenly took on new meaning, and new revisions (Billet, 2015). In addition, there was no real way to treat these affected soldiers, the likely sufferer’s of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, other than to give them opiates such as heroin, or massive amounts of alcohol. This distanced families from their sons, and often led the veterans to become intermed or homeless, much as it is today. This specific type of post-battle melancholy had been documented for centuries prior to the Great War, but picked up the pace during the American civil war, when the amount of battleground death escalated exponentially.
Critics will mention the style of house that Kafka lived with his family in, and say that it is exactly like Gregor’s house. This is so inconsequential, it is surprising that it is even mentioned. Most houses in Prague are structured that way. In a time earlier, when Prague was being built up, a type of architecture emerged as almost always happened in early European metropolises (Batson, 2011). Franz was also very familiar with his own house, so it is logical that he would use his own house as a point of reference for writing this work, making it pointless to even mention.
This analysis is not trying to discredit the personal links between the novella and its author. Rather, it is only suggesting that to flatly surmise that this book isn’t symbolic of anything else is a bit short-sighted. There are, of course, many similarities and links to Kafka’s own life in the book. Gregor becomes desperately lonely, something Kafka completely understood. He was socially awkward, like an insect would be if it talk and try to walk around like a human being. Gregor felt trapped in a room that had three entrances and a window on the fourth wall. This could have been Gregor remembering his childhood. The image of the hospital across the street is tragically ironic. On one hand, no one ever thought to take Gregor to the hospital, but on the other, what could have possibly been done at the hospital. In Kafka’s real life, he must have felt like this when he was a child, a hospital visit just staring him in the face, but with the knowledge that it probably just wouldn’t do him any good
So it is entirely possible that these two connections or allegories in the novella can work by themselves, but more likely, they worked side by side. Now we can add in a third layer of allegory, the politics of war.
This book was banned by Hitler and Mussolini during their respective dictatorships. This may seem overly surprising, considering it is just a book about Kafka’s personal life and his friends coming back from war with PTSD. It was also celebrated throughout much of Soviet rule. The key to understanding all of this, at least initially, is the role the manager plays throughout a majority of the book. He is portrayed as someone Gregor wants to please, but on the the face of it, the manager is extremely authoritarian. So much so, that he sees no problem with barging into Gregor’s home and admonishing him for being but only a couple hours late to work, when he had been on time and stayed late for the manager throughout his career (Reese, 2004). In fact, the manager, when he begins to threaten Gregor’s job, without even knowing what has happened to him, shows a very vile and sadistic side to this manager.
The manager went out of his way to take a train just to tear him apart. This actually makes the company less productive by two people, the manager and Gregor. The manager is a dictator, and there begins a case for a large portion of this book being an allegory for war. This can be followed up with Gregor’s submissiveness to the job prior to becoming a bug, and the parents who stood strongly in solidarity with the manager.
There are other allegorical cases to be made in addition to these three. Some have seen this book as a statement against formal religion, arguing that the lack of ornamentation in Gregor’s room is symbolic of being against all the money spent by several religions on iconic artistry. Others argue it is pro-religion, that Gregor should have been better cared for in his time of greatest need, and to ignore those in dire need of help is a sin that must be looked down on. The list goes on. In the end, very little in the way of notes are available on what Kafka meant, other than that he felt the work was unfinished, and the ending was embarrassing for him personally (Corngold, copyright 2016).
As was stated in the beginning of this paper, the intention or thesis was to show that this novella had more substance than just being a simple work about a simple man. Though there are some clear similarities between the author and his work, they can all be attributed to Kafka just being a writer. No matter what it is we write, our personalities and lives end up spilling onto the page one way or another. Kafka is very unoriginal in this way, and possibly in only this way.
Works Cited
Batson, Robbie. “Kafka~Samsa. Reality Through Symbolism.” The Kafka Project. 8 Jan. 2011.
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Billet, Alexander. “The Metamorphosis at 100.” Jacobin Magazine web portal. 31 Oct. 2015.
Web. 15 Apr. 2016.
Corngold, Stanley. “Kafka's Die Verwandlung: Metamorphosis of the Metaphor.” Academia.edu.
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Galinda, Mariana. “The Metamorphosis Historical Context.” Prezi. 21 Feb. 2013. Web.
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Reese, Robert James. “Marxist Theory in The Metamorphosis.” Essays. 2004. Web. 15. Apr.
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