An Echo of a Modernist Voice in Reference to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: Change as Constant and Humanity as Memory

This paper intends to place Kafka as a modernist by identifying certain aspects in The Metamorphosis. Kafka as a voice of modernism came into prominence mostly with his posthumous publications where he made a metaphorical representation of the deep seated realities of time. The Metamorphosis is about a commercial traveller, fatigued by the tiresome journey, who turns into monstrous vermin and the respite comes to his family and himself once he is eliminated. Kafka as usually does not clearly come up with the details of the gigantic insect that Gregor has turned into, rather he keeps it for the readers to find out by talking to each other, against each other and to themselves. Gregor is monstrous in appearance as he is perceived by others and himself but within, he is a victim who has been crushed under the monstrous wheels of capitalist world. It is only after becoming a gigantic insect, Gregor reveals everything about himself and his surrounding either in form of reminiscence or with his observation. One may find some sort of umbilical cord existing between Kafka and Gregor as Kafka himself was a poor creature whose back leg is stuck in the Judaism while his front leg, in vain, quested for a new ground, but that idea cannot be the only guiding beacon in comprehending Kafka and his works. Writing in the first half of twentieth-century in the rapidly changing world, the story The Metamorphosis carries in itself all that makes it worth considering among all other Kafka’s work.