How unconditional is your love?

Thoughts on Franz Kafka’s book The Metamorphosis.

Would you still love your child if they turned into an insect overnight? Better yet, would you love them or would you simply endure them?

These are the types of questions that Kafka’s fictional book raised for me.

First off, let’s be clear. I’m not a literature major. I don’t pick up on all of the nuances that probably should be found in a fictional piece of literature.

Then again, literature is like art. We all get to interpret in our own way. And if you are anything like me, I’m kind of tired of “experts” telling me the “correct” interpretation of literature or art — or the meaning of life.

Isn’t that what the postmodernists have been teaching us all along? That we bring ourselves to the text? That no book or piece of art has a singular or definitive explanation? That, as with life, none of us ever see the text objectively.

As with all of life, we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

If you haven’t read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, you should. It’s only 60 pages and can be read in a single night (that is, unless you have kids like I do).