Short Story Criticism | The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka - Norman N. Holland (essay date 1958)

Norman N. Holland (essay date 1958)

SOURCE: "Kafka's 'Metamorphosis'," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. IV, No. 2, Summer, 1958, pp. 143-50.

[In the following essay, Holland examines Kafka's attribution of spiritual value to realistic elements in "The Metamorphosis," claiming "the realistic details of the story are fraught with significance."]

In allegory, symbolism, and surrealism—the three genres are in this respect, at least, indistinguishable—the writer mixes unrealistic elements into a realistic situation. Thus, Kafka, in Metamorphosis, puts into the realistic, prosaic environment of the Samsa household a situation that is, to put it mildly, unrealistic: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream, he found himself changed in his bed to some monstrous kind of vermin." Kafka's strategy does not in essence differ from the techniques of Spenser and Bunyan: though they used for the unreal elements...

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