kafka

After watching Kafka my view of The Metamorphosis and Franz Kafka changed greatly. To be honest I thought he was sort of a whack job. I am not going to lie, I thought that the scholars of today must have been on something when they considered The Metamorphosis to be a piece of literary merit. Sure, if you looked hard enough you could see some connections, but I thought that they simply looked too hard and saw something that was not really there. I believed that they formed these profound connections through great pains and struggle, and that they gave Kafka too much credit. But after the film I realized that I was wrong. Franz Kafka was not an ignorant man by any means. He was probably so intelligent and wrote so well that to the unlearned men and women the book is simply a weird science fiction novel (which brought down my self-esteem a bit when my first reaction was just that). But to those who know where to look and know how to analyze a great piece of literature, the novel is a gold mine.

After watching the movie about the real Kafka, I looked at the novel very differently. The movie mentioned the novel and if the film held any truth about the real Kafka, then I was all wrong. I believed Franz Kafka to be an open pompous writer that thought he could write anything and proclaim it to be art. But once I learned that he actually wrote the novels in secret those thoughts went away. He seemed to be a man who did not write for others, but simply for himself. That is probably why The Metamorphosis does not state things in black and white, because he felt no need to explain his thoughts. To say the least, I grew respect for Kafka.

I believe the moral of the novel is not to take things for granted, especially your family. Gregor provided for his family, and that is all he thought about. He never spent time with them and rarely talked to them about anything substantial. Then he turned into a bug and was unable to communicate or see them. He took his life for granted and had to pay the price later on. The moral of Kafka may be that you can not live in ignorance, nor can you live in complete truth. Kafka chose not to stay ignorant, and that choice threatened his life. But he would rather be knowledgeable of the truth than to live a fake life in ignorance.

Kafka may be saying that family is more than someone you provide for. Family defines you. Without them you have no reason to live. Gregor suffered from his ignorance of that fact. Kafka is also saying that humanity does not bode well with those they are unfamiliar with. Gregor’s family knew the bug was Gregor and yet they could not stand his presence or to look at him. They acted inhumane just because he looked differently. They began to forget that he was at one point their son and this resulted in his death. Even though he was blood related, they treated him inhumane. This reflects the real world in many ways.