Metamorphosis A Novella By Franz Kafka English Literature Essay

metamorphosis A Novella By Franz Kafka English Literature Essay transfiguration is a novella by Franz Kafka and deals with the travelling sales mankind Gregor Samsa, who is the familys sole earner, waking up single morning finding himself transformed into a bug. In the following Kafka describes how Gregors place within the family as well as the family itself change.The story is divided into three parts. Each of them ends with Gregor attempting to break out off his room but being refused and scathe by his family. The set-back part begins with Gregor awaking and finding himself transformed into a bug. Curiously he is rather worried close to being late for work than about being non human each longer. Even on the first page evidence for Todorovs theme of The Self kindle be found. This Theme deals with his interest in the self and the world around this self in relation to the fantastic and the supernatural. The subscriber does not know if Gregor really transformed into a bug. Th is ambiguity, according to Todorov, is the actor for the reader hesitating between different possible explanations of thus farts, the realistic and the supernatural. When the reader decides whether an fifty-fiftyt was real or imaginary, the story is either uncanny or marvelous.1Metamorphosis therefore is rather a marvelous narrative considering that the reader is not explicitly told why Gregor has transformed into a bug.To Todorov every word in the novella is a description of the fantastic universe and that there is no reality or truth outside this language used.2When Kafka writes that It was no dream3and that his family cannot understand him anymore because his voice altered,4this is evidence enough for Todorov to accept that Gregor really transformed into a bug.Furthermore he argues that Metamorphoses constitute a transgression of the separation between subject and mind5and that transition from mind to matter become possible.6Gregor is very unhappy with his life working very hard to gain acceptance and having no conviction for having a relationship. Feeling like a bug as yettually transformed him into a bug.Todorov also wrote about the theme of The Other dealing with the relation of man and his hope and repress desires. This is a very interesting theme which can be found in Metamorphosis as well. Right on the first page we learn about Gregor having a picture of a lady in a fur hat and stole bolding in the direction of the onlooker a heavy fur muff into which she had thrust the whole of her forearm.7Freud argues that fur is used as a fetich on account of its association with the hairness of the mons veneris veneris.8Gregor has to work very hard to earn enough money for the whole family. Therefore he has no time to fetch a relationship. According to Freud, knowledgeable desire is an impulse that is made analougous to the impulse of taking nourishment, and to hunger.9Gregor repressed this desire for a long time and it has to be satisfied.When Gregor does not come to work the hirer clerk comes to his house to see him. Gregor manages to open the door but his family and the chief clerk are frightened. His father tries to force him to go back and eventually kicks and he is thrown back into his room.The second part shows explicitly Gregors relationship to his family and how this changes. His sister is looking after him twice a day and cleans his room regularly.10Gregor loves his sister and even planned to send her to expensive school.11He is always pleased about when she enters the room and feels sad about not being able to thank her for what she does for him.12He knows that she sickens at him but still does not hesitate to feed him.13She even brings him a range of food to choose from when she recognizes that he has not drunk the milk.14In this scene Grete enters the room, how Gregor describes, almost completely dressed15to him this must be a detail, important enough to mention. Due to his sexual repressed desire he even seems to see his sister as possible sexual object. Freud argues that an excessive need for affection a boy may cling for the infantile attraction for sisters which has been repressed in puberty.16At the end of part two it is the sister who argues that Gregors furniture should be removed which hits him very hard knowing them to be the wholly things that made him not feel like he was not human anymore. Nevertheless he is certain that his sister only wants to create space in his room to pass by him the chance to fawn.17Still he wants to save the picture of the lady as very give way relation to his personhood and so he crawled hurriedly up to it and pressed himself against the glass, which stuck to him and impartet a pleasant coolness to his hot belly.18This underlines that his sexual desire is strong and that this is the most important thing to him. According to Todorov, there is no longer any frontier between the object and the observer.19It makes no difference to Gregor that this is no real woman but only a picture.When his sister enters the room her eyes encountered those of Gregor, up on the wall.20Here again, Gregor relates his sexual desire to his sister in a very obvious way. Gregor desperately protects this picture and, by that, frightens his family again. His father shies apples at him until one of them pierced his back and Gregor collapses with pain.In the third part Kafka describes how Gregor is now able to listen to his family through the open door to the living room. All family members have a job now but they still have money problems which force them to let room to tenants. When his sister plays the violin one wickedness, Gregor, drawn by the music, decides to crawl closer to her.21He recognizes that, apart from him, no one really appreciates her play.22He crawls even closer meet her gaze.23Todorov argues that sexual desire gains an exceptional mastery everywhere hero.24Although Gregor knows that there are people around who are not supposed to see him , he cannot resist getting closer to her.In the following Gregor describes explicitly how he desires his sister, he sensed a way to the unknown sustenance he longed for. He was determined to go right up to his sister, to pluck at her skirt and so let her know she was to come into his room.25He wants her to sit next to him and to be with him until he dies.26Furthermore he wants to kiss her on the throat.27He obviously desires his own sister and has sexual phantasies of her. According to Todorov, the literature of the fantastic illustrates several transformations of desire.28Most of them belonged to a social form of the uncanny.29So does incest. Gregors sexual desire takes everyplace and he cannot think of anything else but to be close to his sister.When the tenants spot him when he crawls closer to Grete they immediately move out. Now Grete is really angry, locks him into his room and claims that they have to get rid of Gregor30who dies the next day. His family is rather relieved th an in mourning about his death. They plan to move into a cheaper flat and to marry Grete.Now I am going to compare Kafkas novella to Brother and Sister, a fairytale by the Brothers Grimm. The story deals with the lives of two siblings, running away from home because they are do by by an old witch who is their stepmother.The action can be divided into three parts, as well. In the first part the children depart from home. Meanwhile their stepmother has casted her spells over all the pullulates in the forest.31Eventually companion gets thirsty and wants to drink from a stream but sister can hold him off doing so because she can hear it murmuring Who drinks of me will be a tiger.32Although the brother is very thirsty he does not drink. When they come to the next stream, brother is glowing to drink but sister can hold him off again, hearing it murmuring Who drinks me will be a wolf.33At the next stream she can hear that brother is going to be a roe, if he drinks the water but she can not stop him who is already drinking and immediately falls on the grass transformed into a little Roebuck.34The transformation in this fairytale is, unlike Gregors transformation, introduced by two streams until brother eventually cannot resist any longer. Gregors transformation, in contrast, is not introduced at all. The whole novella starts with this transformation that, due to that point, lacks of surprise in comparison to the fairytale.Furthermore the fairytale is definitely a marvelous one. The reader accepts the fantastic, the fact that the witch can curse all streams, which makes her, as Todorov calls it, a supernatural being,35having power over human destiny,36and the fact that brother transforms into a deer, as part of the world. Hence both of Todorovs supernatural elements can be found in this story.Brother and sister are very sad about the business office but sister promises Never mind, dear little fawn, I will never forsake you, and she takes off her golden garter and t ies it round the Roes neck.37Then she fastens a rope to the collar. This shows the symbolic connection between the two siblings. She promises never to leave him and even connects himself to him. They have a very close relationship which is expressed even in the first sentence, Brother took sister by the hand.38This indicates that brother desires his sister in a way Gregor desires Grete. He wants so be near her and he needs her to look after him and to be with him. Gregor and brother both depend on their sisters.They now live in a small house in the forest and if brother had but kept his natural form, really it would have been a most delightful kind of life.39This explicitly tells the reader that they would have lived together like couples do.Here the second part begins. The king has a endure through the wood. When the deer hears about that it wants to join and after begging his sister she lets him go. The hunt lasts three days and the hunters are eager to shoot the beautiful deer which can always run away though it gets hurt once. On the last day the king follows the deer to the house and finds sister. He asks her who has grown to a lovely maiden40to marry her. She answers Oh yes But you must let my Roe come, too. I could not possibly forsake it.41Sister even takes brother into her marriage with the king and keeps her promise.Here the last part begins. The stepmother watches all this with envy and when sister gives drive home to a baby, the witch traps her by leading her into the bathroom and locking the door. She and her hideous daughter make a blazing hot fire under the bath, so that the lovely young Queen might be suffocated.42Then she lays her daughter in the big businessmans bed and makes her look alike her. The king never notices. all(prenominal) night the real queens ghost comes to see after her baby and the deer. When she decides to come only for three more nights, the nurse, who watches her every night, tells the king. In the last night of her v isit the king cries out that she has to be his wife. She answers Yes, I am your dear wife and in the same moment she was restored to life, and was as fresh and well and rose-cheeked as ever.43The witch and her daughter are put to death and the spell was taken off the little Roe, and he was restored to his natural shape.44These are two transformations. The queen in restored to life by the kings love and the brother is retransformed into a human being by the witchs death.The fairytales last sentence is again evidence for the assumption that brother desires his sister, and so brother and sister lived happily ever after.45Sister obviously does not share her live with her husband, the king whose love restored her, but with her brother. This seems to be the only way for them to be happy.To sum it all up, Metamorphosis and Brother and Sister doubtlessly deal with transformations and are fantastic narratives in Todorovs sense. Especially the fairytale applies to that having the witch as a f antastic character who controls human destiny.Dealing with the theme of sexual desire, Metamorphosis conforms to that more explicitly although there are several textual evidences in Brother and Sister that indicate an incestuous relationship between the siblings, too.(2207 words)