While the young businessman Georg Bendemann is condemned to death in Kafka’s metaphorical world, the young commercial traveler Gregor Samsa in “Die Verwandlung” ( “The Metamorphosis”) must live out the last months of his life in the same world changed as a giant bug, which resembles a cockroach. Compared with “Die Verwandlung,” the little prose…
Tag: Germany
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka – Analysis – Symbols
Probably the two most memorable images in ”The Metamorphosis” occur in its first section: first the picture of Gregor Samsa transformed into an insect, lying on his back in bed and unable to get up, with all his little legs fluttering helplessly in the air; and second the picture of Gregor the giant insect stuck…
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka – Setting
Socio-Economic Background For most of Kafka’s lifetime, his home town of Prague was a Czech city within a German-speaking empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Only at the end of World War I did that Empire disappear, leading to the creation of an independent Czechoslovakia. But in 1912, when Kafka was writing ‘ The Metamorphosis,” the Czechs…
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka – Symbols – Literary Devices
Point of View The story is told in the third person but is for the most part limited to Gregor’s point of view. Only his thoughts and feelings are presented, and most of the events are seen through his eyes. The point seems to be to present a picture of Gregor and the world as…
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka – Themes
Alienation at Work One of the themes of the story is the unpleasantness of work. Gregor Samsa hates his job as a travelling salesman, but must continue doing it to pay off his parents’ debts. There is no suggestion that he gets any job satisfaction; all he talks about is how exhausting the job is,…
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka – Characters
Charwoman Hired by the Samsas to replace their live-in servant, the charwoman is a tough old woman who, unlike the other characters, is neither horrified nor frightened by Gregor’ s insect form. She even refers to Gregor affectionately as “the old dung beetle” and less affectionately threatens him with a chair. She is the one…
Dune by Frank Herbert: Themes
Religion The main theme of Dune is the disastrous effect that messianic religious belief can have on human society. Herbert’s original inspiration was the messianic cult of personality that was attached to Adolf Hitler, who exploited the power it gave him to start World War II and the Holocaust. Herbert treats this through fiction in…
Germany 1866-1945 by Gordon A. Craig
1. What is the central focus of the book? How does the author thread a narrative through the sequence of distinct political phases between 1866 and 1945? Toward the middle of the 19th century Germany was witness to profound political churnings. The century that ensued is perhaps the nation’s most eventful and yet the most…
All Quiet on the Western Front: Analysis
Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front offers readers a fictional yet accurate account of the life of a common soldier in the trenches during final two years of the First World War. Like the book’s narrator, Paul Baumer, Remarque was a German soldier himself. During the decade following the German defeat, he…
All Quiet on the Western Front: Setting
World War I Named for its complex involvement of countries from Northern Europe to Africa, western Asia, and the V.S., World War I, called the Great War, was ignited by a single episode. On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia. As the Austrian government…