The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka - Martin Greenberg (essay date 1966)
Martin Greenberg (essay date 1966)
SOURCE: "Kafka's Metamorphosis and Modern Spirituality," in Tri-Quarterly, No. 6, 1966, pp. 5-20.
[In the following essay, Greenberg examines The Metamorphosis as the dying lament of a spiritually vacant modern man.]
The mother follow'd, weeping loud,
'O, that I such a fiend should bear!'
—Blake
In the Middle Ages it was the
temporal which was the inessential
in relation to spirituality; in the
19th century the opposite occurred:
the temporal was primary and
the spiritual was the inessential
parasite which gnawed away
at it and tried to destroy it.
—Sartre
Kafka's Metamorphosis is peculiar as a narrative in having its climax in the very first sentence: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."...
[The entire page is 9787 words long]
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