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The Metamorphosis By Kafka

Decent Essays

The misunderstandings, the confusion, the despair that permeate Kafka's writing is derived from a vision of disintegration. Although the symbolic images in which Kafka expresses these visions allude, often simultaneously, to man's relation to himself, to society, and to God, it is the psychological perspective that provides the core from which the sociological and theological implications are refracted.
What emerges from Kafka's descriptions of his struggle to live an authentic life is a dynamic of psychological integration. His labor to give artistic form to the material of his inner life involved the achievement of a fruitful continuum between the unconscious and conscious that would find its culmination in a sense of spiritual justification. …show more content…

Kafka's literary method is suggested at the beginning of each of these novels by a device that he had used effectively in "The Metamorphosis." In each of these works, Kafka invokes the dream dimension by having the hero's uncanny experiences erupt upon an awakening from sleep. Gregor Samsa awakes from a night of disturbing dreams to find his nightmare come true. Joseph K.'s nightmare begins when he is arbitrarily arrested in his bed one morning. Joseph K. thinks himself dreaming when he is awakened to be informed of the strange regulations of the village to which he has just arrived. By rooting the action in the dream world, Kafka refers the origin of the drama to the hero's unconscious and leads the reader into the strange world in which these psychological implications will be ramified in other thematic contexts. In these stories, Kafka achieves a detachment from his personal obsessions that allows him to contemplate in a parabolic mode the problematic nature of the human condition. Be-cause of their brevity and schematic simplicity, these stories provide a microcosmic blueprint of Kafka's literary

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