Metamorphosis By Franz Kafka Literary Analysis

The opening of a novel or play is what captivates the reader’s interest into the continuation of further reading. The first few lines are what set apart the readers first impressions, as to whether one should proceed in the continuation of reading or to back out over the threshold. The beginning of a novel or play as David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (London: Vintage, 2011, pg 5) exemplifies ‘is a threshold, separating the real world we inhabit from the world the novelist has imagined.’ Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis opens a climatic effect, as the reader is thrust upon the predicament of an overnight occurrence, unaware of any recognition of the protagonist’s transformation. The opening of Metamorphosis establishes an unconventional, activist quality that sets the pace and tone for the significant transformation experienced by Gregor Samsa and his family within Kafka’s realist dialect. Kafka diverts any typical conventions of fictional openings, as readers are left to use ‘a frame of cultural reference’ (how to read literature, pg 8) to establish the protagonist and surroundings of which is being described within Kafka’s fictional world, to speculate Kafka’s thoughts and beliefs on human condition and existence
through an outburst ‘of a kind of silence’ .
The opening sentence of a novella is the first initial gasp and utterance of life. Much of the action within Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis consists with the first opening line, as Kafka attempts to come to terms with the physical change experienced by his protagonist, Gregor Samsa. The reader is thrust upon an immediate transition of Gregor, as he ‘awoke one morning from troubled dreams [to find] himself changed into a monstrous cockroach.’ (Kafka, Hofmann2007, p.87). Upon the opening of Metamorphosis, readers are stripped away from all traditional expectations of
literary openings, and as a result this confounds the reader, as there is little evidence to suggest why this transformation has occurred. Unlike the opening of Virginias Woolf ‘Mrs Dalloway’ which offers a subtle and eccentric opening expressing a women’s claim to authority as ‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’ Kafka places Gregor and the reader in a similar disposition, as the protagonist awakes from ‘troubled dreams’ , metaphorically, both the Gregor and the reader are ‘troubled,’ oblivious to any occurrence of the physical or psychological transition which has occurred over night, thus resulting in the questioning of human existence. Furthermore, the opening of this fictional world provokes a sense of irony, as ideas of the norm are reversed, rather than Gregor awakening from a ‘nightmare’ ; he finds himself awakening into a ‘nightmare’ , the ‘nightmare’ world which is always beneath the surface. As the opening of the novella ‘springs out of a kind of silence’ it results in the reader suspended in a state of disbelief unable to neither discover nor identify why such an occurrence has taken place. Little do the readers know, this is not revealed, and the reader is left sceptical, theorizing numerous reasoning’s, throughout and after the novella. The extensive and descriptive opening is absolute, and therefore must be accepted before proceeding into the novella; which Terry Eagleton classifies, ‘There is a sense in which literary openings are absolute’. Providing the reader with an absolute opening has led the reader to question human existence, as it prevails the real truths about ourselves as a society and its formalities in life as the reader must accept what has happened to Gregor, and suspend their belief to enter Gregor’s world ‘that did not exist’ . Like Gregor, the reader is forced to continue with the formalities of life and the reality of his transformation into a ‘monstrous cockroach, an opening which has ‘[sprung] out of a kind of silence’ .