The Bible's notion of the "promised land" has had a profound influence on secular literature. Modern authors have reinterpreted this biblical ideal to include any land of redemption or salvation. This is an important concept in both Dostoevsky's...

In Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" and in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's " A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," an understanding of the cruelty of mankind is revealed through an examination of the themes and the characters in both of their stories....

In his short story "A Hunger Artist," Franz Kafka uses the extreme example of the fictional hunger artist to discuss the dichotomy between art and life. Usually, an artist uses his life to create his art. Thus, an artist alienated from the world...

“For he alone knew, what no other initiate knew, how

easy it was to fast. It was the easiest thing in the world.”

– Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist”

What does it mean to willfully fast, or to deny hunger, the most fundamental of human drives? The short...

In A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka, one can argue the character of the Hunger Artist is an absurdist anti-hero parallel to the heroic figure of Jesus Christ in the Holy Bible. The Hunger Artist is a narration of a "starving, dying art", and one of...

In "A Report to an Academy," the marvelous transformation of the fictional ape Rotpeter offers striking insight into human adaptive behavior, and blurs and then elucidates the differences between man and ape. The short story, written as a letter...

Language is definitive of humanity. Spoken, written, or signed, every type of communication is essential to human interaction and is a crucial feature of civilization that differentiates humans from animals. Franz Kafka, author of The...

The aim of this essay is to investigate to what extent Kafka conveys a collapse in communication, how he achieves this enterprise, the significance of this goal, and the effect his literary decisions have upon the reader’s perception of the...

Like death or abandonment, alienation is one of the deepest-rooted fears experienced by human beings. As social creatures, humans have the need to identify themselves as one of a group, whether that group is a family, a culture, or a religion. The...

In Franz Kafka's stories "The Metamorphosis", "In The Penal Colony", and "The Fasting-Artist", the protagonists, Gregor Samsa, the officer, and the fasting-artist, each make apparent sacrifices. These characters give their lives for others, but...

References to food are a recurring theme in Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The food that Gregor eats to strengthen his physical body reflects the attention that he receives from his family to satiate his emotional appetite. As the story...

Franz Kafkaâs The Metamorphosis contains direct biographical references to Kafka and his familyâs lives. Gregorâs fatherâs dishonest actions stem from Kafkaâs hatred against own his father for his relentless disapproval of Kafkaâs writing. Kafka...

Looking at literature in a general sense, it can be seen that some pieces which use a distorted literary style, instead of the straightforward directness of realism, can, when written effectively, be very useful and highly informative, if for no...

The modern crisis of authority revolves around the recognition that current versions of traditional authority are no longer credible or reliable. Such a dramatic shift in perception cannot be effectively realized in the safe, florid writing of La...

In his short story "The Metamorphosis" Franz Kafka examines the alienation from society that turns a human being into a bug. At the same time, he also examines how not being alienated from society and how corroborating with society can turn human...

Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis is as a disturbing look at the absurdity of life-and is literature at its most unsettling and most introspective. Throughout much of his life, Kafka suffered from insecurity and internal torment. An...

In Franz Kafka's classic, The Metamorphosis, family members of Gregor Samsa, the main character who is a giant insect, ignore Gregor for a majority of the plot. Disregard for Gregor eventually obliterates him. In Oedipus the King by Sophocles,...

Many consider Franz Kafka one of the most prominent and influential writers of the twentieth century (Votteler 204). Many of his works, mostly short stories, met with critical acclaim only after his death in 1924. His stories usually present, "a...

In Camus’ The Stranger and Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the protagonist finds himself in an extraordinary situation that challenges his will. In both novels, this initially unsympathetic character struggles to redeem himself. In so doing, his identity...

Gregor Samsa’s unconscious can be explained through three important symbols prevalent in The Metamorphosis. According to the Freudian theoretical framework, these three symbols are personified in Samsa’s mother, father and sister. For Samsa, his...

In The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the authors use the motif of solitude and isolation to symbolize freedom. These qualities free Gregor Samsa and the town of Macondo, respectively,...

Dehumanization of the protagonist is a common thematic element in both Kafka’s <i>The Metamorphosis</i> and O’Connor’s “A Late Encounter of the Enemy,” although the various aspects of dehumanization differ between the two works....

Naguib Mahfouz and Franz Kafka both use setting as an important literary feature in their respective works, <i>Midaq Alley</i> and <i>The Metamorphosis</i>. Mahfouz’s <i>Midaq Alley</i> takes place in the back...

One thing that Shusaku Endo’s Silence and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis have in common is the aftertaste they leave in the reader’s intellectual palate. Unlike most authors, Endo and Kafka refuse to oblige the readers with a satisfying happy...