holy shit this was boring

What if he got turned into a pickle instead

>>24577381 (OP)
Read the modern interpretation

>>24577381 (OP)
Kafka is an excelent stylist but when you get down to what he has to say, he's a whiny teenager.

You're boring

>>24577381 (OP)
just like my diary desu

I first read this on a miserable 10-hour flight when I was going through SSRI withdrawals so its bleak misery spoke deep to my soul.

>>24577419
Last panel is kino

I forget the ending. Did he just die or something. The apple being lodged in his back was funny.

>>24577392
that would have been fucking hilarious

>>24577659
he died and his family celebrated and happily talked about their bright futures lol

Kafka was Jewish, a religious minority that was deeply hated in his time in society leading up to nazi rule and the Holocaust.

Isolation, alienation, being treated like a non-human vermin. As a Muslim in the USA I can't help but find these hidden themes obvious in the experience of also being a hated religious minority in this time and place. It is an oppressive absurdity, I truly can't relate with most people. No one would find it pleasant to hear what is on my mind, of our government actively genociding and starving my people, their favorite politicians perpetuating inhuman crimes against my people, slavery and persecution worldwide.

Am no stranger to dehumanization. Casual suggestion to mass murder my people, to burn the Scripture of my faith and our houses of worship, to slaughter men, women, and children, entirely socially acceptable here. Like Kafka I find refuge in the mystical tradition of my faith, for which there is no shortage of reading material, ideas and practices, even ancient and medieval institutions built in far off lands where these mystics dwell in ascetic seclusion. Also in communion with nature, crucial to the mystical practice.

A roach? No, but that is a slur used against Muslims. Something unwanted, alien, criminal, something most want out of their sight and mind. Someone for who it is socially acceptable for public figures to outright declare as subhuman. And I oblige, as I am a solitary type, dwelling in poverty out in the woods where all living things have a natural place.

The city ghetto I have found to be hostile, same as the old ghettoes of the Jews in Europe. But here in the countryside there is space to breathe and privacy in the trees. If there is room for me then there is room for those like me, and perhaps we can build for ourselves a place where we can live as we do and be seen and treated amongst ourselves as human beings.

>>24577760

It is crucial that a man in such circumstance refuses to dehumanize himself. To allow those who boldly and openly declare you as a non-human to gain victory over your sense of self and to even slightly view your own self as they do to you with impunity. No, I am a human being. I live as a human being, even if the government and the armed forces deem me as a non-human and base on this their entire foreign policy and endless wars of imperialist genocide. I am not a roach, a monstrous vermin, am a human being as any other.

You see this theme throughout the works of Kafka, who notably wrote in German, including in The Trial (Der Prozess) in which a man is brought to trial by an alien authority beyond his reach or communication for crimes that are never actually revealed. Surely this is the experience of a Jew in turn-of-the-century Europe who by his very existence is denied certain rights and access to institutions of society by law. I think this is crucial to understanding Kafka, the experience of the hated religious minority. Alienated, isolated, true absurdity and not the pleasant kind. He also writes a story about a penal camp of cruel and inhuman torture, a premonition. A nazi death camp is not unlike Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, a CIA blacksite. Metamorphisis is a nightmare story.

But here in the country it is a different story. Down by the water, deep in the woods, an idyllic setting for Fikr and Muraqaba, quite literally what was to ancient desert Muslims the very conception of Paradise. Gardens beneath which rivers flow. I can only speculate what the desert wanderers of Moses and his caravan in exile would make of it. The red-tailed hawk, the blue heron, the turtle and the snakes, the fish and robins and bluebirds, the butterfly, the red fox, the coyote, the graceful and effortless deer. To these and more I am only human, they do not understand what religion even means, but they speak in their movementa and lives by the hand of God for which Muraqaba provides a silent and unconscious dialogue with all creation.

And in this context, the wilderness, we are all only human and this vitality cannot be denied by any. And so I sit in Muraqaba, so still, silent, watching the entire symphony of life unfold and seeing in it a silent communication in the language of God. And in this, stillness and peace, sweet peace and steady joy.

Was this scene necessary?

>>24577760
Pretentious sandnigger

>>24577760
Stopped reading at: "as a muslim in the USA". Even worse than Christians.

>>24577381 (OP)
One of the things I really like about this Kafka work is just how blatantly personal it is.

Kafka was extremely self conscious, and felt really emasculated when compared to his father.
Knowing this and reading the Metamorphosis, it becomes clear that the "metamorphosis" isn't about the main character's transformation into a giant roach, in fact, it could be interpreted that nothing has changed for the main character. No, the metamorphosis is in regard to the family, as they stop being held back by being dependents of the useless son, but transform to depend on themselves and the patriarchal father whose rising to the occasion basically turns the entire family around from depressed paupers, to a happy family with a prosperous future.

The son watches how the family thrives more without him, than they ever did with him, and basically realises he is exactly as he should be and gives up on life.
Kafka has another story, much shorter, where the narrator visits his ailing dying father on his death bed, and the father chews the son out so bad for being a useless loser, that the son runs out and jumps off a bridge - basically being a much more on the nose and tighter version of what The Metamorphosis is.

They're basically narrative metaphors for Kafka's relationship with his father and his own family, and how he feels he failed them.
...not that this high school level analysis makes the story more interesting, but knowing Kafka's life story really puts the story into perspective.

>>24577828
NNNNGGHHHHH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA IM GONNA PUT MY INSECTOPLASM INTO YOUR CU*t PLATE RAAAAAAAAAAAA
(I post on in /wg/ daily)