Anxiety and loneliness are themes that permeate Franz Kafka’s life and work. Through his life and his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis, we examine how he expressed the depths of the modern human psyche.
The Life of Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka, a German-Jewish writer, was a novelist who explored human existence, alienation, and nihilism within modern society. He is widely recognized as an existentialist novelist who relentlessly pursued the human condition within settings that were both unrealistic and realistic. He is praised for achieving a captivating symbolism that broadly suggests the anxiety and alienation of the 20th-century world through powerless characters and the bizarre events that befall them.
Kafka was born in Prague, Czech Republic (then part of the Kingdom of Bohemia within the Austro-Hungarian Empire), into a German-speaking middle-class Jewish family. He had a poor relationship with his father, a self-made merchant who was large in stature and domineering. To his father’s realistic and meticulous eye, his son appeared merely a dreamer. To young Kafka, his father seemed a relentless workaholic, utterly absorbed in the success of his business and indifferent to his family.
To climb the social ladder, even his mother had to assist his father’s business, so he was raised by others. At ages two and four, he witnessed the births of his brothers Georg and Heinrich, only to see them die shortly after. Later, when he was six years old in 1889, his sister Elli was born, followed by Wally a year later, and Otla two years after that. Yet these three sisters too would fall victim to the madness of World War II. Witnessing the discord with his father and the successive deaths of his siblings, he endured an unstable childhood.
Seeing no merchant’s instinct in Kafka, his father enrolled him in a German-language humanities secondary school. There, Kafka met several important friends with whom he would maintain lifelong connections: Rudolf Illowy, the Zionist Hugo Bergmann, Ewald Felix Priebar, and Oskar Pollak. Enrolling at Charles Ferdinand University in Prague in 1901, Kafka showed interest mainly in literature and art history lectures, but chose law as his major to fulfill his father’s wishes. However, having no desire whatsoever to become a judge or lawyer, he joined a general insurance company after receiving his doctorate in law in 1906 and completing a one-year probationary period at the court. After transferring to the “Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia” in 1908, he worked there as a legal advisor until 1922, two years before his death. He would leave work at 2 PM and write late into the night.
At this time, working conditions in Europe were extremely poor. Through his work here—including official business trips and contact with workers—Kafka directly experienced the ruthlessness of the bureaucratic apparatus, the harsh treatment of laborers, and their miserable living conditions. This likely allowed him to penetrate the inner workings of capitalist society. The profound insight into individual alienation and powerlessness evident in his works can be traced back to this period.
In 1919, he coughed up blood but refused medical examination, leading to worsening symptoms that forced him to move between a sanatorium and his sisters’ homes. Yet during this period, he finally experienced an attachment to life and happiness he had never known before, thanks to the devoted love of Dora Diamant, who remained with him until his death. Dora nursed him day and night, but in 1924, the frail and introverted Kafka, driven by the pressures of societal expectations like success and marriage, succumbed to tuberculosis and malnutrition while writing, ending his life at the young age of 41.
Kafka lived an unhappy life. He was shunned by the Germans who dominated Prague’s upper echelons because he was Jewish, and by his fellow Jews because he opposed Zionism. During his lifetime, Kafka reluctantly published his work only at the insistence of publishers, and even then, his published works sold poorly due to public misunderstanding. In a letter to his friend Max Brod written shortly before his death, he requested that all his writings be burned, revealing his desire for nothing beyond writing. Yet, his works, which depicted the world’s uncertainty and the human psyche’s unease with original imagination, gained worldwide recognition after his death.
He began writing “Amerika” and “The Metamorphosis” in 1912, and in 1914 started work on “In the Penal Colony” and “The Trial.” In 1916, he completed the short story collection “A Country Doctor.” In 1917, he contracted tuberculosis and traveled to various sanatoriums for treatment. He began writing “The Castle” in 1922. Ultimately succumbing to tuberculosis, he died in 1924 at the Kierling Sanatorium outside Vienna. Besides “The Metamorphosis,” his major works include “The Trial,” “The Castle,” “Amerika,” “In the Penal Colony,” “A Country Doctor,” and “Wedding Preparations in the Country.”
The Metamorphosis: A Tale of Human Fragility, Anxiety, and Solitude
“Do not despair. Even if you find yourself in a situation where you cannot help but despair, do not despair. Even when it seems all is lost, new strength will eventually arise. When everything is truly over, is there even a reason to despair?”
Kafka, who spoke these words, is counted among the most studied and frequently discussed authors not only in German literature but in world literature as a whole. The reason countless people around the world have focused on Kafka’s literature is that he astonishingly well fused the anxiety and loneliness of human existence and the stories of people placed in extreme situations into his writing. Kafka’s works depict the process by which the daily lives of timid and weak individuals collapse, unable to withstand the force of one-sided and violent authority.
The work we’ve explored this time, The Metamorphosis, deals with the conflict the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, experiences with his family after waking from an anxious dream one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. Gregor Samsa’s fate evokes Lavan’s dream in “Wedding Preparations in the Country.” While Lavan forces his self into the form of a beetle lying in bed, he sends only his well-dressed physical body to the countryside, seeking to fulfill the world’s demands. In this story too, the thought that arises in Gregor Samsa upon waking is the pressure to constantly prove himself a capable employee while also being responsible for his family’s livelihood. The Metamorphosis expresses precisely his repressed desires. He rebels against his employer and father, who treat him arbitrarily, and his rebellion creates a form of terror in his unconscious. Through his metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa escapes his enslaved state and his role as a dependent changes. However, his family views him as a parasite to be eliminated, and by his sister’s decision, he meets his end.
The next morning, after Gregor Samsa dies, the family, who had suffered for months because of him, cheerfully heads out for a picnic in the countryside. They quickly change their moods on the tram, then plan to swiftly dispose of Gregor Samsa’s corpse and belongings and move to another place. The compartment they all occupied was filled with warm sunlight streaming in. They leaned back comfortably in their seats and discussed future prospects; upon closer observation, it became clear that the future was not entirely bleak.
Gregor Samsa’s attempt to escape his room is a desperate struggle to be accepted as a member of his family. The failure of this struggle signifies the absence of genuine communication among family members. If communication within a family is this broken, how much worse must it be among members of society?
The family bears significant responsibility for Gregor Samsa’s misfortune, and within the inhuman form of terror, the family’s own inhumanity is laid bare. This is evident in the father’s stance against his transformed son, and the novel’s inhuman conclusion starkly reveals the family’s true nature.
The Metamorphosis is one of the few works published during Kafka’s lifetime. The author’s cold, realistic style—which depicts the peculiar humor and bizarre events characteristic of transformation tales as if they were ordinary occurrences—possesses a compelling force that draws readers into the dimension of existence and the world of absurdity. Therefore, The Metamorphosis symbolizes the life of an ordinary citizen imprisoned in a despairing world where modern people could find themselves at any time, in any circumstance. The Metamorphosis depicts the process by which a weak human being, faced with anxiety, loneliness, and extreme circumstances, collapses without being able to resist the force of violent authority. It is regarded as one of Kafka’s masterpieces.
