As a German-speaking Jew in majority Czech-speaking Prague, Kafka was twice a stranger in the society in which he lived.The story’s horror evolves from the tension between the absurdity of the situation and the narrator’s dispassionate tone.Yet the story touches on a much wider range of issues: debilitating depression, disgust with one’s own body, and the suffocating nature of social and family norms.The parable is in part based on Franz Kafka’s troubled relationship with his own father.
After his father severely injures him, Gregor decides to stop burdening the family and dies. But soon his physical state deteriorates, and the family loses patience. At first, his sister brings him food, cleans the room and shows some concern for him. He continues in a state of denial and keeps worrying about how to support his family.
While the mechanisms of conformity have changed, the story still resonates today among readers left empty by a substantially richer but ultimately oppressive existence. By the 1960s, his depiction of the crushing weight and ultimate futility of being a good son and brother became a banner for youth trying to create a better world based on individuality, creativity and spontaneity. While The Metamorphosis predates the era when totalitarian ideologies attempted to harness the individual to the needs of the collective, Kafka clearly saw how modern life demanded a submission of the will to the demands of the group – both through the need to earn a living and to maintain social conventions. Capturing his own feelings and fears on the page, his intensely personalized stories prefigured the focus on the individual and his or her relationship to society, a sentiment that dominated the latter half of the 1900s. Though he lived and died in obscurity, Franz Kafka (1883– 1924) managed to become one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.
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