Vladimir Nabokov

Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, awakes one morning to find out that he has been transformed into a gigantic insect. From his bed, he looks around his room, adjusting physically and mentally to his new body and wondering if he hasn’t been dreaming. But when he tries to turn over onto his right side and can’t, he realizes that it is no dream, that indeed he is an insect, complete with a hard shell for a back, wriggling legs, and feelers. At last, plagued by guilt, Gregor agrees with his…

Blood Relation Finds Their Way Closer! It was bucketing with rain in the deserts of Cairo, Egypt at the fall of dawn, in a May season when Egypt’s Queen, Cleopatra abandoned her three young children of Julius Caesar’s blood, Cleopatrick, Cleopatricka and Cleopatran in different locations around the vast deserts of Egypt. The three babies survived that day. The next crisp Autumn morning was when they were seen by three distant orphanage members and taken to the orphanages. Cleopatricka was…

The novel Runner is a coming of age story written by Robert Newton, published in 2005. Charlie Feehan, a bright 16 year old boy living a low class life in the suburb of Richmond in 1919, battling his father’s recent passing and other troubles that come with poverty. He falls into working for an infamous criminal ‘Squizzy Taylor’ to earn money for his family, but will soon realise through his love for running, his true destiny, with the help of his newfound father Mr. Redmond. Newton uses ‘boots’…

Throughout The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka the main characters change greatly, though Gregor’s father stood out the most. He progresses and regresses as the story continues, but it’s the almost immediate transformation aside from Gregor; He becomes violent, changes his attitude of life itself, and completely abandons Gregor. Gregor’s father beats down on the door and is curious as to why his son didn’t get up for work that morning (Kafka, pg. 16). Gregor had gone to work every day, he had done…

It is easy to get stuck in the mud of routine. Life can be difficult, and complacency is all too sweet a friend in these times. If one is not careful, however, this stagnant way of life can be crippling, as it causes one to settle for less than their best. Once caught in this rut, it can be almost impossible to get out. In Franz Kafka’s novella, The Metamorphosis, the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, finds himself in this very situation. Gregor leads a mediocre life. He provides for his family,…

Franz Kafka was an Austrian-Czech writer who was born in Prague. Kafka comes from a Jewish background and happened to be around during the time Hitler was in power. He had a larger family, consisting of three sisters, whom died during the Holocaust, and his parents. One of the issues he dealt with throughout his life was his rocky relationship with his father. Another issue he faces throughout his life is that he struggles with pursuing a career as a writer and conforming to society’s…

Kafka creates a tone of dread and despair in The Metamorphosis. Kafka establishes this tone in the first line of the novella as Gregor awakes from “unsettling dreams” to find himself “changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin” (3). The diction of “unsettling dreams” immediately produces an atmosphere of unease. The imagery of a “monstrous vermin” generates a sense of horror, and the reader understands that Kafka’s Gregor does not present a cheerful protagonist. Kafka describes Gregor’s…

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in the center of Prague. His father, a bullying shopkeeper, and his mother, a wealthy brewer’s daughter, had 5 children with Kafka as their eldest only son. Kafka was sensitive and had literary interests, both distasteful to his father. Their relationship remained strained throughout Kafka’s life, and his father authoritarian and overbearing personality affected much of Kafka’s writing. Prague had a largely Jewish population though the Kafka family was not very…

“The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka shows the absurdist nature of the Samsa family through the themes of; isolation, money and, family. The main absurdity is that Gregor is a bug, and that he magically turns into a beetle overnight. The aforementioned themes are all based around this, and the way the family reacts and treats him is in result of him becoming a bug and being unable to be the provider of the house. The fact that he is unable to bring money into the house now, is why the family…

In The Book of The Dead, by Edwidge Danticat, Ka’s father, along with his wife and daughter, leaves his homeland. Although he managed to escape physically from the home of his past filled with memories of his cruel acts by moving to the United States, he is unable to escape those memories of his home. Ka’s father left Haiti believing that in this way, he would manage to start over, without the haunting guilt and remorse of how he tortured Haitians in jail even regardless of their innocence.…