1. Nature of People
1.1. "she...loved music and could play the violin movingly" (20).
2. Tone: Kafka shows disinterest throughout the novel as each chapter reveals depression. It lacks happiness. The depressing tone represents the similarity to Kafka and Gregor. The article describes Kafka’s life as it starts explaining- “This paper will look into the text to show how this is a story about the author’s personal life portrayed through his dream-like fantasies”- The novel does an outstanding job representing this tone by the way Kafka writes it. He lived through this and that’s why the tone is easy to understand. He writes his personal life with fantasy.
3. Motif: Everyone goes through a metamorphosis. Gregor mentally changes when he has to adapt to the roles of an insect and he physically changes when he wakes up transformed into a bug. The novel describes, “As if this were a sign to Gregor that you needed teeth to eat with and that even with the best make of toothless jaws you couldn’t do a thing” (Kafka 34). Grete undergoes a transformation of being immature and young. The beginning of the novel describes her, “Of course it was not only childish defiance and the self-confidence she had recently acquired so unexpectedly and at such a cost that led her to make this demand” (Kafka 25). The novel explains more about her age, “Perhaps, however, the romantic enthusiasm of girls her age, which seeks to indulge itself at every opportunity” (Kafka 25). It describes the young age she is at and how she reacts to her brother’s metamorphosis at this age. In the end she matured by helping the family financially and growing into a young woman as the novel explains, “As they watched their daughter getting livelier and livelier, that lately, in spite of all the troubles which had turned her cheeks pale, she had blossomed into a good-looking, shapely girl” (Kafka 42). There are many other motifs, but this one stood out the most to me.
3.1. Theme: People separate themselves from society and begin to turn into something that does not have societal characteristics. Gregor is emotionally and physically separated from the world, even from his family, “Admittedly no one paid attention to him” (Kafka 35). He’s in his room 24/7 and never leaves. He abandons himself from his family and becomes an insect, but dies because of suffocating his life from others. He has no other outside relationships besides his family.
3.1.1. Point of View: The point of view shifts from Gregor to third person. In the beginning it’s all about Gregor, his house, and his room. The first page even starts out with what happens to Gregor. An example of Gregor’s point of view is when he speaks to himself, “Oh God, he thought, what a grueling job I’ve picked” (Kafka 1). By the end, it’s all about the family moving on and abandoning him. The novel describes how they forgotten Gregor when going into detail about moving, “We’ve done everything humanly possible to take care of it and to put up with it; I don’t think anyone can blame us in the least” (Kafka 37).
4. Craft
4.1. Character Development: Gregor is an insect although he still has human characteristics, such as wishing he could be around his family. Gregor shows this throw the novel, “Sometimes he thought that the next time the door opened he would take charge of the family’s affairs again, just as he had done in the old days” (Kafka 31). He always would say comments about the old days and how he use to be apart of the family. In the beginning the family loves him and takes care of him. In the middle and the end, they forget about him and abandon him from the family. Grete, Gregor’s sister, tells her father, “We have to get rid of it” (Kafka 37).
5. Franz Kafka
6. Marxist Literary Lens
6.1. Marxism in The Metamorphosis
6.1.1. Gregor
6.1.2. Gregor's family
6.1.3. Ending
6.1.3.1. Gregor's death
6.1.3.2. His family's new life
6.1.3.2.1. "Leaning back comfortably in their seats, they discussed their prospects for the time to come, and it seemed on closer examination that these weren't bad at all, for all three positions, about which they had never really asked one another in any detail-were exceedingly advantageous and especially promising for the future" (42).
6.1.4. Authority figures
6.1.4.1. Names
6.1.4.2. Height
6.1.4.2.1. "But the empty high-ceilinged room in which he was forced to lie flat on the floor made him nervous" (17).
6.1.4.2.2. "He was afraid that his father might interpret a flight onto the walls or the ceiling as a piece of particular nastiness" (28).
6.1.4.3. Deference
6.1.4.4. Misunderstanding
7. Formalist Literary Lens
7.1. Self Fulfilling Prophecy?
7.1.1. New node
7.1.2. New node
7.2. Gregor is dead.
7.3. Motif of the Door
8. Biographical Lens
8.1. Religion: Jewish, Antisemitism in Prague, Max Brod: "convinced several generations of scholars that his parables were part of an elaborate quest for an unreachable God"
8.1.1. Kafka's Relationship with his Father: Yiddish theatre, German names for children, overbearing, duty, factory/suicide
8.1.1.1. Kafka Part of the Story: acceptance, self-alienation, meaning behind transformation into vermin
9. Craft
9.1. symbolism
9.1.1. door / bedroom
9.1.1.1. isolation or freedom
9.1.1.2. dependency
9.2. imagery
9.2.1. "He was lying on his back as hard as armor plate, and when he lifted his head a little, he saw his vaulted brown belly, sectioned by arch-shaped ribs, to whose dome the cover, about to slide off completely, could barely cling" (Kafka 3).
9.3. figures of speech
9.3.1. personification
9.3.2. new node
10. New Historical Lens
10.1. 1912 Writing of Metamorphosis: Met Felice Bauer this year
10.1.1. 1914 Germany declares war on Russia Thought of becoming a soldier for WWI Ended his relationship with Felice
10.1.1.1. 1915 Publishes Metamorphosis Won the Theodor Fontane Prize
10.1.2. 1913 Proposed to Felice
11. Translations by Stanley Corngold
12. Manuscript Revisions
13. CONNECTIONS
13.1. REAL LIFE
13.1.1. Octopus Manhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_mqpWozClE&feature=relmfu
13.1.1.1. Like the reaction of the parents and sister in the novel, society is afraid and hesitant to except people who are diffrent.
13.1.2. Wolf Children http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JojLZ-OQJOs
13.1.3. A genetic disorder is a disease that is caused by an abnormality in an individual's DNA. Abnormalities can range from a small mutation in a single gene to the addition or subtraction of an entire chromosome or set of chromosomes.
13.1.4. Turner Syndrome
13.1.5. Huntington's Disease
13.2. Novels and Stories
13.2.1. Twilight
13.2.1.1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHtfATq_Pl0
13.2.2. Harry Potter
13.2.2.1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzZcDHHNINk
14. MEDIA
14.1. FAIRYTALES
14.1.1. Beauty and the Beast http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ba_kgtZSfE
14.1.2. Cinderella http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBgXWIClfng&feature=related
14.2. FILM/TV
14.2.1. Being Human http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E42vMCBsqsQ&feature=endscreen&NR=1
14.2.2. Freaky Friday http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j44PeWTUREc&feature=relmfu
15. Literary Influences and Movements
15.1. 1915
15.2. 1915 ART Styles
15.2.1. Modernism