Kafka and Metamorphosis

Aiman Bashir
2 min readNov 8, 2022

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Metamorphosis literally means "change of morph or shape". Meta means more than a few forms into which an organism naturally transforms. The idea Kafka presented, suggests a universal tragedy experienced by fertile minds which are controlled or domineered by a figure’s assertion over an individual’s integrity. It might be society or a specific controlling force. In a circumstance like this, the individuality is lost externally and internally, it becomes a rebellious force which eats the person from within and afterwards manifests itself in cruel form in the bonds formed by that person. A person affected by it might experience a loss of sense of existence so that he has a fascination for freedom but not being able to achieve that, he finds the social systems unjust and sees only death as escape.

Particularly talking about Kafka, his father was way too controlling and disgusted his existence only to make him feel inferior in order to govern a control over him . This made him feel as if he was no more and in his form was a mere bug, an insect whose will didn't matter. His father forced him to study law, despised his sickness, undermined the fact that Kafka was a potential literary genius (like I said "Fertile Mind"
Those are the perks of suffering. )

To produce excellent literature at the cost of diminishing one's self at the hands of society or it's elements is still a death and personally I think Kafka's writing is the breath that allowed a partly dead man to breathe life for some time and to experience longing and dejection as a joy of suffering.
His writings reflect the loss he felt at a personal and individual level in a grim, mystery setting. The mood dwells into pathos of extreme isolation in a surrealist/fantastical/magic-realism genre where we live through a wretched, part-man/part-void condemned man's dreams and walk with him as he takes us from realms of such an individual's consciousness and subconscious. Most of Kafka's work manifests a certain degree of autobiography which juxtaposes various images of Kafka as a figure at the same time in relation to a figure that acts as an opposing / dictating force. His creative power can be recognized through the short stories while the oceanic degree of his suffering can be understood ( according to one's understanding and relatability ofc) from the extremely tragic letter that he wrote to his father.
In a nutshell, however objective might be the suffering, the subjectivity of it is in accord with one's sensitivity and sensibility and Franz Kafka was a sensitive soul who used pen and shaped in regard to the universalized standards what might psychologically be an explanation of man's greatest torment in what we now call a Kafkaesquen style.

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Aiman Bashir

Summer child transcending in to autumn. Writer. Postmodern fragment of famililal and societal traditions rebelling from the idea of existence itself.