The Metamorphosis Pdf is a Classic Fantasy Fiction Novel that centres on philosophy and other stories written By Franz Kafka. With it’s startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first opening, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction.
The Metamorphosis Book Summary
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.
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The Metamorphosis pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : Classix Press; 8/13/09 edition (September 12, 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 44 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1557427666
- ISBN-13 : 978-1557427663
- Item Weight : 3.68 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.11 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #6,007 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews: 4.6 out of 5 stars 1,278 ratings
About Franz Kafka Author of The Metamorphosis Pdf Book
Prague-born writer Franz Kafka Author of The Metamorphosis Pdf wrote in German, and his stories, such as “ The Metamorphosis ” (1916), and posthumously published novels, including The Trial (1925), concern troubled individuals in a nightmarishly impersonal world.
Jewish middle-class family of this major fiction writer of the 20th century spoke German. People consider his unique body of much incomplete writing, mainly published posthumously, among the most influential in European literature.
His stories include “The Metamorphosis” (1912) and “ In the Penal Colony ” (1914), whereas his posthumous novels include The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927). Despite first language, Kafka also spoke fluent Czech. Later, Kafka acquired some knowledge of the French language and culture from Flaubert, one of his favorite authors.
The Metamorphosis Book Review
4.0 out of 5 stars Interpreting “The Metamorphosis” for the Internet Age
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 3, 2017
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I had read Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” a while ago, and while I had found it interesting and morbid, had not thought about it in broader terms. I re-read the story again recently, wondering if it presented parallels for our age of mute communication enabled by the Internet. The Metamorphosis deals with themes of social alienation (often self-imposed) and existential anxiety. It’s worth understanding the context in which the story was written. This context involves Kafka’s own life and personality. Kafka held himself in low self-esteem and thought himself inadequate socially and sexually; he seems to have had several relationships with women but also visited prostitutes. Most importantly in the context of “The Metamorphosis”, he feared that people would find him physically and mentally repulsive and seems to have suffered from an eating disorder.
These qualities of self-loathing are inherent in the story. The protagonist Gregor Samsa finds himself transformed into a giant insect who his parents and sister naturally find repellant. He also starts hating most food, including even the rotten food that his loving sister tearfully puts in his room. It is clear that the insect loathes himself and understands why his own family would loathe him and wish him gone. It’s also significant that while Samsa can perfectly understand what his family is saying about him, his own speech is now grotesquely that of an insect and incomprehensible to them. Torn between an inability to communicate and a perfect ability to understand, the insect naturally feels both alienation and existential angst.
We should not have to look too far to find parallels in the digital age for most of Kafka’s afflictions. Technology and especially social media has sequestered us away from human contact in the same way that Samsa’s fundamental transformation shut him out. We spend hours on the Internet in our home, and yet can legitimately claim to have no real, human connection to the world outside. This is reflected in our “friendship” with hundreds of people on social media which translates to nihilistic friendlessness outside this medium. We also think that we can perfectly understand what people outside are saying, but just like the insect, keep on banging on the walls of our self-imposed prison because we cannot make ourselves heard above the din outside. We make a lot of noise, but very little sound.
A lot of the existential anxiety which we feel results from this dissonance between the clear, one way-mirror of the outside world and the opaque prison of the inside, a prison which nevertheless occasionally gives us the illusion of being able to communicate before the whole façade regularly comes tumbling down. Just like the giant insect, our minds are torn between wanting to communicate and wanting to believe that we can.
Most deaf are the technology companies which in our age seem to play the role of Samsa’s family; they claim to know what we are saying and even pretend to love us, but what they are offering us is a diet of information addiction and distraction which is being force fed to us. Like Samsa, we find ourselves in a love-hate relationship with these companies; on one hand we want to reject their sustenance, but on the other we find ourselves increasingly unable to survive without it. We hate ourselves for craving the food that the tech companies send our way, and we pity ourselves if we don’t have it.
The role of Samsa’s parents can also be ascribed to the global internet community which pretends to be our friend but whose main function is to publicly shame, vilify and abandon us the moment we say something they disagree with. The sense of alienation which Samsa feels partly comes from not being able to communicate with his parents and partly from their anger and disgust at his transformation. Similarly, the global internet community pretends to care about us because we are part of the same digital ecosystem, while being able to turn on us in disgust and indignation in a moment when we undergo our own transformation, a transformation perhaps to an unpopular social or political viewpoint. Veering away from the community and tech companies’ groupthink will be our version of the Metamorphosis. Is is therefore not surprising that we find ourselves suffering extreme feelings of alienation, facing censure, ostracism and indifference from a community that from the outside seems to look just like us but which really is so different as to be an actual alien species, again like Samsa’s giant insect.
The end of “The Metamorphosis” involves Samsa becoming infected and rueful and finally dying from shame, neglect and self-imposed starvation. A similar fate would likely befall the Gregor Samsas of today’s globally connected world, signified perhaps by these modern day vermin turning into brainwashed internet addicts who have completely surrendered their privacy, creative potential and personal dignity to both Internet companies and the global social media community. The original Gregor Samsa died, but this kind of complete surrender of mind and body would likely be a fate worse than death, perhaps not appreciated fully by the victims because of their delusional state, but real nonetheless.
However it need not be so. Gregor’s mistake was in pretending that his family would want a normal relationship with him even after his transformation. While it would have been difficult, it would not have been impossible for him to be proactive in severing his connections with them, perhaps running away into the sewers or streets and starting an independent existence as a free insect. Such a lifestyle would have been challenging to say the least, but it would have led to a strange and exhilarating kind of freedom from dependence on his parents’ approval and love.
The metaphor for our Internet age would be freedom from both the tech companies’ and the digital community’s feigned love toward us. The more we keep craving their approval, the more we will keep on becoming a victim of our own self-imposed existential angst. That way would lie catastrophe. Severing the bond with these two entities would not be easy and I don’t know what the best way to do it is. But there have certainly been some opinions offered toward this goal. What I do know is that when a Gregor Samsa from this world decides to escape, even into the sewers, he or she would find it much easier if other Gregor Samsas are already waiting in there.
5.0 out of 5 stars It took us 100 years to get the joke.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 9, 2017
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In 1915, that is over 100 years ago, Franz Kafka published the story “Metamorphosis” about Gregor Samsa who wakes up in the morning to discover that he has been turned to a large insect. The mere mention of Kafka immediately prepares me to think onyx black thoughts. And then I read Metamorphosis and found it a black hole in outer space dark. So downbeat negative that I felt my pores dehydrating and my heart shriveled up into a prune. I laid on my couch contemplating poor Gregor insect walking around with an embedded apple inflaming his back hesitating to tug at his sister’s apron to show appreciating at her violin playing. When a sudden realization came over me. This story is roaring hilarious. Like roll on the floor funny. Think “Honey, I shrunk the kids” or “17 again”. Those movies are funny because they place the protagonist in an completely insane position. Imagine Tina Fey in a completely straight face reading the first line of the story: “When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed right there in his bed into some sort of monstrous insect.” Imagine you have woken up to discover that you have six feeble hairy legs and your first thought is: “Oh no! I am going to be late for work”. It only took us 100 years to get the joke.
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