Franz Kafka

NOTES ON FRANZ KAFKA

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

There is no shortage in literary history of strange transformations.  There is The Metamorphosis by Roman poet Ovid, and there is The Golden Ass by another Roman poet, Apuleius.  But in those texts, the strange transformations didn’t happen without a reason that the poet cared to explain –magic was involved, or the transformed person had been trying to escape from someone pursuing him or her, or was being punished for something done.  That is not the case with Kafka.  His protagonist has nothing but a disorderly dream as warning for his transformation.  The story, as the Norton editors point out, is not allegorical – it is not a tale in which we are to translate the concrete, material image of a creature into some abstract quality, as when we say a lion stands for courage, and so forth.  It is tempting to turn the entire story into an allegory that way, into a story that involves the coming-to-consciousness of the protagonist to his previous situation.  But the problem with doing that is that Kafka focuses so intently upon the present situation.  We are less concerned about the old person than we are about the current insect.  I am not even sure that this “insect” is allowed to reflect a great deal on the changes that come over the members of his family as they gradually reject him.  He does have powers of reflection, but obviously this is not a narrative from which he is going to emerge alive and a wiser man, or even a wiser insect.  The transformation creates an impossible situation which turns fatal, as we might have expected.