Stuck in your bunk, you’re sunk Can’t turn up the right waaaay
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka in case anyone was wondering.
The most boring story ever. A guy wakes up, notices he is a beetle for whatever reason, and is afraid his family might notice. That’s it. Why anyone would waste paper on printing this shit is incomprehendable.
The guy who’s partly responsible for feeding his family can’t do that very thing anymore and notices that he basically lost all value to them (they start treating him like shit until he dies). If you want you can say its a book about failing to fulfill gender expectations and about why a patriarchy also is bad for men. About people loving him for what he’s doing, not for who he is, and that love eroding as soon as he can’t do that anymore.
Of course you can hallucinate about everything into that story, but that still does not change the fact that it is boring like hell.
Agree. It was a chore listening to it. Good it’s short.
Edit* it’s one of the pieces of literature that can’t be reviewed anymore. Like 1984.
1984 is good with the whole world building thing. The moment our protagonist falls in love and fuck the chick in that field its over.
It’s SO sad what happened to him. Imagine having a colostomy because you couldn’t stop doing drugs. Or drowning.
I’d argue it didn’t happen to him, but he did it to himself. A sad way to go, for sure, but he was well aware of him doing it.
While technically true, it feels kinda blamey and thought-terminating. I prefer to view addiction as a medical condition because it puts the focus on treatment and prevention rather than who did wrong.
I do agree with that, but you can’t say there wasn’t awareness on his side.
While I follow some of your argument I cannot entirely absolve the self in matters of addiction. It is a medical condition, but I wouldn’t call alcoholics who drive under the influence and kill a person not responsible for their actions., therefore drowning in a drug induced stupor has a function of responsibility in it.
I do see where you’re coming from!
At some point, I radically rejected the concept of blame for extreme cases — all the way from drunk driving to murder. I think it’s necessary to prevent these people who are acting irrationally from hurting others, but it just feels like a waste of my emotional energy to assign blame to someone who’s behaving in a way I can’t comprehend.
For context, someone in my family was killed when I was a kid. I still feel anger at the perpetrator, but I can’t even pretend to understand what would go through their head to make them act the way they did. My conclusion was just that they’re basically an alien to me — a broken person who can’t be trusted and has to be locked up. But did they commit a sin?
After writing this, I realize it’s the same sentiment as “Larry Ellison is a lawnmower.”
Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think “oh, the lawnmower hates me” – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.
I can see how that makes coping easier. And follow your agreement for a bit.
The grasmower argument doesn’t gel with me, though. I can’t release human agency that easily. I mean one doesn’t have to anthropomorphize a human being, as they are -well- a human being.
But on the ethical side of this much debate is possible. It hangs on the free will/ determination side of debate, not really one end all answer.
I feel like I should read at least one book by Kafka. Any recommendations?
That one on the image. Metamorphosis is a fun short book that you show you what Kafka is about.
On the other hand, The Trial is a long, heavy book that will make you feel like you have gone crazy. Personally, I can’t stand this one. (Though, it’s because it’s very good on what it intends to do.)
I did an entire semester on him, and maybe I’m just a philistine but for my money there was very little difference between Before the Law (a short story of ~650 words) and any of his longer works. So if you’ve read that and The Metamorphosis you know basically all you need to know about his writing.
There are other interesting stories for sure (I’d recommend In the Penal Colony and The Trial as Bones also mentioned), but the themes are very much the same throughout-- which I suppose is why the work Kafkaesque exists.
