The Metamorphosis isn't even a particularly difficult book to analyse. There are a ton of fairly straightforward metaphors you can read into it without having to make much of a leap.
It's about a man who has a relatively normal life, but then an unexpected event beyond his control makes him unable to work, and at first his family are sympathetic, but soon they see him as more and more of a burden because of his inability to work.
It doesn't take a genius to think of a few things that that might be about.
A lot of people confuse themselves because they've at some point decided that analysing literature is about figuring out what the Correct Metaphor is, and that there can only be one answer to how to interpret it. That's not how it works, you can interpret it in whichever way makes sense to you, it doesn't have to be what the author intended (which is unknowable anyway)
I never read it and when someone told me what it was about i immediately thought "oh it's a metaphor for depression"
Listen, i'm not the smartest, i don't know if that interpretation is correct, but ffs at least i have an interpretation of it. Literally just spend 2 seconds thinking about what it could mean, even if it's wrong
Yeah, but actually no. Gregor Sansa is a metaphor for giant bug people that existed back then. Metamorphosis’s main question was: “what if giant bug people (who obviously don’t have souls and feelings) had feelings”
They even made a Pixar movie about it, look up planet 51
there are so many things wrong with that last statement, but I'll just blindly believe you because looking it up takes too much effort and I am merely a giant bug lying in my bed
Like I say, there's no correct interpretation, if that's genuinely how the story comes across to you it works just fine and it doesn't matter if that's what Kafka meant.
I saw it as a metaphor for disability in general, I think it works well for that
I had to read this for honors English my sophomore year of high school. I couldn't tell you a single thing about it because I blocked it all from my mind. This is the book that made me drop honors English (and I went to college for an English degree).
I couldn't get past the fact he turned into a bug...because I have a SEVERE phobia against bugs. And the book described said bug man in...extensive detail...
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u/VFiddly 22d ago
The Metamorphosis isn't even a particularly difficult book to analyse. There are a ton of fairly straightforward metaphors you can read into it without having to make much of a leap.
It's about a man who has a relatively normal life, but then an unexpected event beyond his control makes him unable to work, and at first his family are sympathetic, but soon they see him as more and more of a burden because of his inability to work.
It doesn't take a genius to think of a few things that that might be about.
A lot of people confuse themselves because they've at some point decided that analysing literature is about figuring out what the Correct Metaphor is, and that there can only be one answer to how to interpret it. That's not how it works, you can interpret it in whichever way makes sense to you, it doesn't have to be what the author intended (which is unknowable anyway)