RE: Metamorphosis [By Franz Kafka] Review and Analysis ESP/ENG
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It's interesting - I just read The Metamorphosis last week. I still haven't really come to terms with it. It's a book that can bear many interpretations; certainly, there's much merit in the ones you present. I have to say, though, I didn't feel the desire to interpret the book. For me, it was more a question of experiencing the that level of pain - not only from Gregor, but from his family, too.
I'm not sure that I see the family or Grete as negative - though I know that's a pretty unusual reading. My sense is that they really did do the best they could do with an impossible situation for a period of time. If Grete snapped at the end, well, she's just human. When she mentions how thin she was, I thought there was a return of her compassion. And if the family seemed cold in their relief that it was over? Again, they were just human. They'd said goodbye to Gregor awhile ago - after all, they didn't know that he could still think or understand their speech. To me, the book is like listening to really heart-breaking Blues; I focused more on the feelings, the despair, than the meanings. I'm not saying those meanings aren't there - they just aren't what hit me when I re-read the book.
Of course, literature is art and art is suggestive, everyone gives it the interpretation that best suits him/her. For me, of course, the family situation was not easy, but neither did it help him much to ignore him or even threaten him with a cane or throw apples at him, that is, to treat him with contempt, and this is the representation of the relationship that Kafka himself had with his father, he involved many of his feelings and emotions in this and other of his works.