When Franz Kafka died, he ordered a friend to burn all his manuscripts, including "The Metamorphosis." Should his friend have burned them?
"The Metamorphosis" belongs to a genre that has since come to be known as "magical realism." Some other artists in this genre include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the author of One Hundred Days of Solitude; Juan Rulfo, who wrote the short novel Pedro Paramo; José Donoso, who wrote of strange sexual liasons in works like The Obscene Bird of Night; the ever-dignified and amusing Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote "The Garden of Forking Paths;" and Julio Cortazar's wild novel Hopscotch, Rayuelas for you Spanish readers, which can be read in various orders.
In what ways is "The Metamorphosis" realistic?
Other than Gregor's surprising change, what's bugging him and his family?
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Surprisingly, the metamorphosis, despite the fact that it's protagonist wakes up looking like a giant insect who spends the entirety of the novel locked in his room, is VERY realistic. When one reads the metamorphosis one never forgets that the protagonist is a insect, however they see it as a realistic sort of thing because from gregor's memories and feelings about his life, this metamorphosis had taken place long before the time the novel began. The way his parents milk him for money and his boss runs him at work, the reader gets the feeling this gregor has been a floormat and has lived a pathetic insectile life for long before the novel began. One doesn't forget what the protagonist has become because all ideas, treatment and his priorities are already so insect like from the very beginning. The start begins with his plopping out of bed with his hundred tiny arms wriggling up towards the sky and his insistent panic concerning his inability to work (Of all things). This reminds me of the way ants carry out their jobs on a mechanical level. In this way gregor thinks and that gives Kafka's work a realistic spin on the events.
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