Franz Kafka is a representative writer of 20th-century literature. His life and works deeply explored the absurdity and alienation of human existence, exerting a profound influence on modern literature.
Franz Kafka, who lived a short yet intense life, spent his entire existence moving between two countries (Czechoslovakia and Austria), never finding his own identity and never settling in either land—an eternal stranger. His life bears such a striking resemblance to my own, belonging nowhere, that I find myself inexplicably drawn to him.
Looking up the context of Kafka’s major works in a German dictionary, one finds the following introduction:
“In his works, Kafka often depicts scenes where a powerless individual battles against the abstract and authoritative entity of the state, which he represents through the figure of a patriarchal and authoritarian father.”
His work “The Metamorphosis” was first published in 1915. This work garnered such attention that it can be seen as a pivotal moment marking the beginning of modern literature, and it became the subject of much discussion among many literature lovers.
One morning, the protagonist wakes up to find himself transformed into a bug, leaving him unable to earn money for his family anymore. From that moment on, he becomes a being who must now depend on his family for sustenance. In short, the story is about a hideously transformed insect who becomes hated and a nuisance to others, ultimately choosing to starve himself to death rather than eat. Strangely, Gregor Samsa, transformed into a beetle, neither denies his insect existence nor attempts to free himself.
In 1916, an author named Karl Brandt wrote a sequel to “The Metamorphosis” and published it in a Prague newspaper. By resurrecting Gregor Samsa as a human again, without any thought of liberating himself, he provided the impetus for Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” to become even more famous.
The consciousness of Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” remains unchanged whether he is human or a beetle. The consciousness he possessed as a human persists unchanged until his death.
In this work, readers confront Gregor Samsa’s dual predicament: one is that while his body is that of a beetle, his consciousness persists as that of a traveling salesman; the other is that he expresses a consciousness that dreams of ‘change’ while growing weary of his monotonously repetitive daily life.
In this sense, while the novel cannot be seen as depicting a pathological split of human consciousness into devil and angel like “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” it nonetheless reveals an aspect of a psychopath exhibiting psychological pathology through a human transformed into an insect.
Gregor Samsa ultimately realizes that his family can thrive without him working to support them, and that his very existence as a bug is not only useless to them but a burden. This leads him to recognize his own worthlessness, and driven by loneliness and alienation, he chooses death.
Throughout the novel, it is meticulously depicted that to his family, Gregor is merely a ‘tool’ for earning money. Moreover, Gregor himself frequently complained about the ‘irregular lifestyle, poor-quality food, and fleeting human relationships’ he endured during his business trips.
It should be noted that Kafka had a friend named Max Brod, who ensured his manuscripts saw the light of day. Professor Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch’s book “Max Brod im Kampf um das Judentum” clearly illustrates their relationship and includes excerpts from their correspondence.
On his deathbed, Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his manuscripts. However, Max Brod did not fulfill this request, and Kafka’s manuscripts ended up traveling around the world (?) alongside the events of the First and Second World Wars. This happened because Max Brod, who was Jewish, was being hunted by the Nazis, yet even while fleeing, he took Kafka’s manuscripts with him.
Kafka’s manuscripts were miraculously saved, passing through many countries including Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Denmark, and Israel, and were ultimately stored for many years in a secret vault in Switzerland. After the war ended, they were published as a complete collection by S. Fischer Verlag, a century-old publishing house in Frankfurt, Germany, run by a Jewish owner. To this day, if you visit Prague, you can see the houses where Kafka lived back then, well-preserved, and the streets and houses that served as the backdrop for his works remain unchanged.
