Prev Next

COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Other Stories through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.

Comments

FRANZ KAFKA

This story, The Judgment, I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water. . . . Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.

—from a diary entry (September 23, 1912)

FRANZ KAFKA

Great antipathy to “Metamorphosis.” Unreadable ending. Imperfect almost to its very marrow. It would have turned out much better if I had not been interrupted at the time by the business trip.

—from a diary entry (January 19, 1914)

WALTER BENJAMIN

To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream. There is nothing more memorable than the fervor with which Kafka emphasized his failure.

—from Illuminations (1969)

CLEMENT GREENBERG

One feels that what Kafka wanted to convey transcended literature, and that somewhere, inside him, in spite of himself, art had inevitably to seem shallow, or at least too incomplete to be profound, when compared with reality.

—from Commentary (April 1955)

PAUL AUSTER

In Kafka’s story, the hunger artist dies, but only because he forsakes his art, abandoning the restrictions that had been imposed on him by his manager. The hunger artist goes too far. But that is the risk, the danger inherent in any act of art: you must be willing to give your life.

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life.

—from “The Art of Hunger” (1970)

VLADIMIR NABOKOV

[Franz Kafka] is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him.

—from Lectures on Literature (1980)

THOMAS MANN

[Kafka] was a dreamer, and his compositions are often dreamlike in conception and form; they are as oppressive, illogical, and absurd as dreams, those strange shadow-pictures of actual life. But they are full of a reasoned mortality, an ironic, satiric, desperately reasoned mortality, struggling with all its might toward justice, goodness, and the will of God.

—from his “Homage” preceding Kafka’s The Castle:
Definitive Edition (1954)

MAX BROD

When Kafka read aloud himself . . . humor became particularly clear. Thus, for example, we friends of his laughed quite immoderately when he first let us hear the first chapter of The Trial. And he himself laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any further. Astonishing enough, when you think of the fearful earnestness of this chapter. But that is how it was.

—from Franz Kafka: A Biography (1960)

FRANZ KAFKA

My writing was all about you.

—from “Letter to His Father” (1919)

Questions

1. In considering Kafka’s two diary entries, it becomes evident that the author feels interruptions in the process of composition are detrimental to a writer’s work. Given Kafka’s dissatisfaction with the end of “The Metamorphosis,” and the fact that he failed to complete any of his three novels, what can be said about his notion of resolution? Is a satisfying ending impossible in his fiction? How do you read the ending of “The Metamorphosis”? Does it strike you as particularly superior or inferior to the rest of the tale?

2. Thomas Mann finds Kafka’s literature “full of a reasoned mortality.” Is this consciousness of death what drives Kafka to have Gregor Samsa regress into an insect, the officer in the Penal Colony condemned to a botched and sloppy death, and Georg Bendemann, in “The Judgment,” drown himself on orders from his parents, instead of allowing his characters to overcome their circumstances? Is death itself transcendent in Kafka’s work?

3. Max Brod’s anecdote about Kafka reading aloud reveals not only the latter’s sensibilities, but his intentions. How is Kafka funny? Is Kafka’s sense of humor so peculiar that it is inaccessible?

4. Kafka and his critics always talk about his failures. Some of us think that he succeeded brilliantly. What do you think?

5. Teachers often tell students to apply literature to life. “Literature is equipment for living,” said American philosopher Ken neth Burke. How would you apply Kafka’s fiction to life? Is there any way that reading him might help you to persevere through difficult times?

6. One of Kafka’s methods is to make the subjective objective. Instead of giving us the interior life of a character whose circumstances make him feel like an insect, he gives us a character that has literally turned into one. Does this way of reading “The Metamorphosis” account for all the details?

Prev Next