Essay On Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis

How often do we recognise ourselves in a book that we are reading? How often do we realise that we actually face the same challenges as its protagonist? This realisation happens quite frequently, especially when we stray far afield in our reading. One famous writer once said: "Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self" (Kafka). His name was Franz Kafka, and he was struggling with social anxiety, which resulted in him being an unhappy man who believed in emptiness and misery of life. This belief played a significant role in the nature of his stories where he was actually portraying himself. One of them is called "The Metamorphosis." When knowing enough about Kafka’s life, we are able to see his own autobiography in "The Metamorphosis": troubled relationships with his father and the feeling of not …show more content…
"The Metamorphosis" can be considered as a Kafka’s reflection of his own destiny. Therefore, there is a parallel drawn between the story and Franz Kafka’s life and mental illness.
Franz Kafka’s life was full of suffering. Despite the illness accompanied by troublesome coughs and lasting stays at sanitariums, which lead to his death from tuberculosis, Kafka was also struggling the most ruinous form of self-reproach (Ryan). "Kafka is not just an ordinary person, he is different, he lives in a state of anxious solitude, foreign to everyone, he is not at home in his own city, nor with his own people, nor within his family, nor will he ever find a woman with whom to share his life. This difference is expressed in the form of a mental disorder, which might also be called a loss of personal identity" (D, Felisati). The protagonist, Gregor Samsa, experiences this loss in "The Metamorphosis." When he awakes, he finds himself being turned into a large insect. If suddenly someone becomes a bug, even though it will never happen in our reality, the reaction to this action