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Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis climaxes in the very first line--the protagonist has indeed been transformed. The critical questions lie in the interpretation of the transformation. Kafka has been said to have offered everything from a psychological parable of Oedipal struggle to a caricature of psychological readings.
The title, Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, part of Chelsea House Publishers' Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on Franz Kafka, a chronology of the author's life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University.
88 pages, Unknown Binding
First published March 1, 1988
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229 people want to read
About the author
Harold Bloom
1,717 books2,026 followersHarold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 6, 2023
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October 6, 2017
This is not The Metamorphosis itself, but a collection of critical essays on the story, edited with an introduction by the famous Harold Bloom. The essays are all comprehensible and in high quality, with Bloom's introduction probably the most profound part of the book. A good read, and wonderful for getting inspirations for papers, as the essays come from a vast range of critical perspectives. Probably not for the casual reader of Kafka though.
June 29, 2024
Was this story absurd? Yes. Was it also strangely captivating? Also yes. This story was very weird but you couldn’t help but identify and sympathize with every character. The Metamorphosis tangles with the struggles of isolation and the oppressive feelings of obligation.
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December 24, 2025Introduction
“ Gregor Samsa is a solitary (his last name, in Czech, can be translated ‘ I am alone.’), a commercial traveler, and a kind of family pariah or outcast, at least in his own tormented vision . .
like Gracchus, like the bucket- rider, like the country doctor, like the hunger artist, Gregor is suspended between the truth of the past, or Jewish memory, and the meaning of the future, or Jewish messianism. Poor Gregor therefore evades the categories both of belief and of poetry. how much would most of us know about this rupture without Kafka or Kafka’s true heir Beckett?.
”The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis”- Allen Thiher
“ to paraphrase what many critics have said about Franz Kafka, it may well be true that his works are reflections of an absurd world in which the emptiness left by the death of God, as Nietzsche put it, has been filled by the creation of a proliferating state bureaucracy, but the power of Kafka’s work really lies and its power to sabotage the possibility of making any such clear statement about it. The works power lies in their undermining any clear representational system or systems of reference that lies beyond the text itself. The stories refuse the referential grounding one needs in order to generate sense, as they designate, often in parodistically fragmented ways, how the fictions these stories contain can only mirror themselves as they attempt to represent a world.
Aesthetic Autonomy in The Metamorphosis - Mark Anderson
“ mother and sister also enter the world of Verkehr.. Grete takes a job as a sales girl….Frau Samsa Help was up by sewing ‘ elegant underwear’ free fashion boutique, working late into the night. With this covert reference to the fancy goods sold in his father’s shop., Jafka depicts Gregor’s Mother as an unwitting madam à distance, mediating the Verkehr of elegant clothing, social ritual, and sexual couplings
Gregors metamorphosis fulfill the dream of every serious fin-de-siècle aesthete: to become not just an artist, but the artwork, the visual icon, itself
A simple studies have pointed out converted image of the first class meeting as well as the basic structure for his story…Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs… two boys through contact between these however, are worth stressing. First is that in both works fur functions as a metonymy for sexual desire, either in the Freudian sense as a fetish, recalling the mother‘s genitalia and pubic hair, or in the popular sense of’ Animal’ passion and corporality. Secondly in both texts desire is a product of images— paintings, sculptures, photographs, staged erotic encounters
Of course, one should be wary of idealizing what is after all a kind of pinup— an erotic photograph cut out of a magazine that a Lonely salesman hangs in this room. And what about the woman’s fur clothing? Isn’t it part of the same Verkehr of clothing, social intercourse, and mortality that defines the Samsa household? Fur was after all the clothing that Adam and Eve put on after being expelled from the garden as Kafka noted when he copied this passage from Genesis into his diary.
In fact, these fur function as emblems not so much of wealth and social status as of anality which this story symbolizes a liberation from specifically human problems of sin, guilt, mortality, and even from pain and self-consciousness. This is the basic narrative movement…: after his initial transformation, Gregor will attempt to realize the promise implicit in this photograph, to merge with his mirror image to descend the evolutionary ladder into an animal state to become the animal artwork
The picture Gregor has cut out of a magazine, thus functions as a coded reference the Kafka own appropriation of Sacher-Masoch’s narrative.
The Sense of an Unding: Kafka, Ovid and the Misfits of Metamorphosis - Michael G Levine
“Is impossibility, then, a stone wall?”
- Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
“ in a letter to his friend Max Brod…Kafka placed his literary production under the sign of a fourfold impossibility: ‘ the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently,’ and finally even ‘ the impossibility of writing’ itself.
It may be useful… to compare certain aspects of his text to Ovid’s Metamorphoses
An avid one finds no one definitive account of origins or source sources. Indeed precisely because there are so many competing creation stories presented in his text, it is impossible to find one string by which the pull all the others. In the absence of any single guiding thread, the reader is left to wind his her way through the stories of intricately woven tapestries, delicate webs, and sturdy nets. In lieu of, one cosmic weaver there is only an incessant interlacing of connections and endless spinning of yarns, and a fabulously, self reflexive fabrication of texts. Weaving my mythical narrative into and through one another, Ovid… raises and answers questions of motivation and causality by telling self legitimating stories; that is the present narratives that in accounting for the existence of Gods, mortals, and natural phenomena, also count for themselves. They contain their self-justification in their own telling— not in anyone’s narrative, but instead in the overall interconnectedness of narratives, in the fabric of their mutual and ever-mutating relations.
Whereas in Ovid transformation, occurs for some particular reason, Kafkas’s … simply begins with the inexplicable and unmotivated transformation of Gregor Samsa into a monstrous vermin… an ungeheures Ungeziefer…as critics have often noticed both terms begin with the negation un-. Moreover, unlike the detachable news of Gogol’s famous story, prefix cannot be separated from the terms to which it adheres, since in German, there is no such thing as a geheuer or a Geziefer. removing the negative prefixes from the signifiers does not restore them to some prior positive form, nor does doubling these negatives by combining them in the phrase… you had any stable positive identity…
If we understand anything about Kafka’s M, it is that this Unding, this monstrosity (formally a traveling salesman) it’s not at home, especially when in its own home… it is significant in disregard that Gregor literally cannot even speak his own mother tongue. Instead, his thoughts are communicated only through the medium of a narrator about whom much remains to be said.
“Kafka’s metamorphosis and the search for meaning in 20th century German literature” - Margit Sinka
even the Germanist Peter Heller says There is nothing in Kafka that he is sure of understanding sufficiently, since there are always possibilities of implications to lure him on and to dismiss him finally with a sense of failure
I find it necessary to inform the students of Friedrich Beissner’s groundbreaking thesis offered in 1952. There is no controlling authorial voice, says Beissner. We experience everything only from the viewpoint of the main character. Thus, instead of reaching conclusions about what is or is not real we are doomed to floundering in the same in decisions and uncertainties as the main character does..
“Metamorphosis: defending the human” - Michael Rowe
Kafka’s metamorphosis can be interpreted on many levels: as a satire on the stifling properties of bourgeois life, as a story of psychological, estrangement and alienation, and as a parable on the fragility of human empathy and solidarity… my purpose… is to draw on certain themes in this story as they relate to prolonged to critical illness, and especially as they concern the relationships between people who are ill and those— family member members, other loved ones, and medical professional professionals— who care for them.
The question at the heart of this essay is: How can we defend individuals’ humanity, as we acknowledge and know it in our relationships and interactions with them, when long-term critical or chronic illness seems to have changed them utterly
“ Gregor Samsa is a solitary (his last name, in Czech, can be translated ‘ I am alone.’), a commercial traveler, and a kind of family pariah or outcast, at least in his own tormented vision . .
like Gracchus, like the bucket- rider, like the country doctor, like the hunger artist, Gregor is suspended between the truth of the past, or Jewish memory, and the meaning of the future, or Jewish messianism. Poor Gregor therefore evades the categories both of belief and of poetry. how much would most of us know about this rupture without Kafka or Kafka’s true heir Beckett?.
”The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis”- Allen Thiher
“ to paraphrase what many critics have said about Franz Kafka, it may well be true that his works are reflections of an absurd world in which the emptiness left by the death of God, as Nietzsche put it, has been filled by the creation of a proliferating state bureaucracy, but the power of Kafka’s work really lies and its power to sabotage the possibility of making any such clear statement about it. The works power lies in their undermining any clear representational system or systems of reference that lies beyond the text itself. The stories refuse the referential grounding one needs in order to generate sense, as they designate, often in parodistically fragmented ways, how the fictions these stories contain can only mirror themselves as they attempt to represent a world.
Aesthetic Autonomy in The Metamorphosis - Mark Anderson
“ mother and sister also enter the world of Verkehr.. Grete takes a job as a sales girl….Frau Samsa Help was up by sewing ‘ elegant underwear’ free fashion boutique, working late into the night. With this covert reference to the fancy goods sold in his father’s shop., Jafka depicts Gregor’s Mother as an unwitting madam à distance, mediating the Verkehr of elegant clothing, social ritual, and sexual couplings
Gregors metamorphosis fulfill the dream of every serious fin-de-siècle aesthete: to become not just an artist, but the artwork, the visual icon, itself
A simple studies have pointed out converted image of the first class meeting as well as the basic structure for his story…Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs… two boys through contact between these however, are worth stressing. First is that in both works fur functions as a metonymy for sexual desire, either in the Freudian sense as a fetish, recalling the mother‘s genitalia and pubic hair, or in the popular sense of’ Animal’ passion and corporality. Secondly in both texts desire is a product of images— paintings, sculptures, photographs, staged erotic encounters
Of course, one should be wary of idealizing what is after all a kind of pinup— an erotic photograph cut out of a magazine that a Lonely salesman hangs in this room. And what about the woman’s fur clothing? Isn’t it part of the same Verkehr of clothing, social intercourse, and mortality that defines the Samsa household? Fur was after all the clothing that Adam and Eve put on after being expelled from the garden as Kafka noted when he copied this passage from Genesis into his diary.
In fact, these fur function as emblems not so much of wealth and social status as of anality which this story symbolizes a liberation from specifically human problems of sin, guilt, mortality, and even from pain and self-consciousness. This is the basic narrative movement…: after his initial transformation, Gregor will attempt to realize the promise implicit in this photograph, to merge with his mirror image to descend the evolutionary ladder into an animal state to become the animal artwork
The picture Gregor has cut out of a magazine, thus functions as a coded reference the Kafka own appropriation of Sacher-Masoch’s narrative.
The Sense of an Unding: Kafka, Ovid and the Misfits of Metamorphosis - Michael G Levine
“Is impossibility, then, a stone wall?”
- Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
“ in a letter to his friend Max Brod…Kafka placed his literary production under the sign of a fourfold impossibility: ‘ the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently,’ and finally even ‘ the impossibility of writing’ itself.
It may be useful… to compare certain aspects of his text to Ovid’s Metamorphoses
An avid one finds no one definitive account of origins or source sources. Indeed precisely because there are so many competing creation stories presented in his text, it is impossible to find one string by which the pull all the others. In the absence of any single guiding thread, the reader is left to wind his her way through the stories of intricately woven tapestries, delicate webs, and sturdy nets. In lieu of, one cosmic weaver there is only an incessant interlacing of connections and endless spinning of yarns, and a fabulously, self reflexive fabrication of texts. Weaving my mythical narrative into and through one another, Ovid… raises and answers questions of motivation and causality by telling self legitimating stories; that is the present narratives that in accounting for the existence of Gods, mortals, and natural phenomena, also count for themselves. They contain their self-justification in their own telling— not in anyone’s narrative, but instead in the overall interconnectedness of narratives, in the fabric of their mutual and ever-mutating relations.
Whereas in Ovid transformation, occurs for some particular reason, Kafkas’s … simply begins with the inexplicable and unmotivated transformation of Gregor Samsa into a monstrous vermin… an ungeheures Ungeziefer…as critics have often noticed both terms begin with the negation un-. Moreover, unlike the detachable news of Gogol’s famous story, prefix cannot be separated from the terms to which it adheres, since in German, there is no such thing as a geheuer or a Geziefer. removing the negative prefixes from the signifiers does not restore them to some prior positive form, nor does doubling these negatives by combining them in the phrase… you had any stable positive identity…
If we understand anything about Kafka’s M, it is that this Unding, this monstrosity (formally a traveling salesman) it’s not at home, especially when in its own home… it is significant in disregard that Gregor literally cannot even speak his own mother tongue. Instead, his thoughts are communicated only through the medium of a narrator about whom much remains to be said.
“Kafka’s metamorphosis and the search for meaning in 20th century German literature” - Margit Sinka
even the Germanist Peter Heller says There is nothing in Kafka that he is sure of understanding sufficiently, since there are always possibilities of implications to lure him on and to dismiss him finally with a sense of failure
I find it necessary to inform the students of Friedrich Beissner’s groundbreaking thesis offered in 1952. There is no controlling authorial voice, says Beissner. We experience everything only from the viewpoint of the main character. Thus, instead of reaching conclusions about what is or is not real we are doomed to floundering in the same in decisions and uncertainties as the main character does..
“Metamorphosis: defending the human” - Michael Rowe
Kafka’s metamorphosis can be interpreted on many levels: as a satire on the stifling properties of bourgeois life, as a story of psychological, estrangement and alienation, and as a parable on the fragility of human empathy and solidarity… my purpose… is to draw on certain themes in this story as they relate to prolonged to critical illness, and especially as they concern the relationships between people who are ill and those— family member members, other loved ones, and medical professional professionals— who care for them.
The question at the heart of this essay is: How can we defend individuals’ humanity, as we acknowledge and know it in our relationships and interactions with them, when long-term critical or chronic illness seems to have changed them utterly
July 18, 2012
Weird, funny, sad ..... but kinda overrated I think.
October 27, 2022
I was honestly surprised by the turnout, I saw quotes from this story in Resident Evil revelations & had been wanting to read it since. It was so good, and could feel the emotions from the characters through the story.
April 23, 2024
Weird and sad
December 8, 2012
This short story is one of my favorites. I wasn't sure if this week's Goodreads posts were meant to be our favorite children's book authors or our favorite authors period so I will do some of each. Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" is great. Gregor is someone I have been able to relate to in the past and I get wrapped up in the tragedy of this story. Even through the translation, Kafka has written a great piece here.
July 18, 2009
It made me think more of Water for Elephants. If he would have been like the grandfather instead of the son the story would have resembled the burdens a person places on a family as he gets closer to death - and still got in that industrial workplace woes and the Jewish woes.
October 29, 2014
There are the Modern Critical Interpretations and then there are the Bloom's Guides. I couldn't find the MCI pdf anywhere so had to make do with this guide which does not touch upon anything significant whatsoever. Disappointing.
December 11, 2008
Overglorified by first year lit students, that want to sound smart because they can reference Kafka.
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February 20, 2009Avanti,fiction
November 23, 2012
Enjoyed this, but must confess some of difficult to comprehend.
December 2, 2016
the buk was lil in4mative...4 ap lit summer hw
August 7, 2012
Too Much detail drowns the story.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews