Word: samsa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wakes up as a giant insect has provided one of the 20th century's hallmark nightmare images. The essence of the horror is that there is no explanation for it, no deeper meaning, no instructive or redemptive metaphor: the suffering just is. In the transmutation of Gregor Samsa, the world ceases to be predictable or rational; natural and moral order disappear. Critics have found in Kafka's vision hints of everything from the Holocaust to AIDS. But to burden the story with greater weight is in fact to lessen it. The thump in the gut comes from the literal details...
...Gregor Samsa awoke one morning... he found, himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect... What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream. The MetamorphosisFranz Kafka...
...does Kafka remain, 100 years after his birth, one of the authentic voices of the age? The answer lies in this centenary volume, Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. His tales, some no more than a paragraph long, have forced their way into the modern consciousness. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa turns into an insect; in A Hunger Artist, a professional faster starves himself to death "because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else." In In the Penal...
...Kafka's fiction the only history is case history: his own. Whether he is called Samsa, Raban or Joseph K., every protagonist is Franz. The oppressive boss, commandant or schoolmaster are all refractions of Hermann Kafka, the father Franz feared: "You acquired in my eyes that enigmatic quality common to all tyrants, whose authority rests not on what they think but on who they are." The accident files that Kafka used by day become A Report to an Academy: "You have done me the honor of inviting me to give an account of the life I formerly...
...spoken. There Freud. So go war and peace, pride and prejudice, decline and fall, perpetually in motions as sweeping as Milton's or as slight as Emily Dickinson considering the grass. Every evening Gatsby looks at Daisy's green light, which is green forever. Every morning Gregor Samsa discovers that he has been transformed into a giant insect...