Franz Kafka is considered by many to be one of the world’s most influential authors to have ever taken a quill in hand. I’d love to say I’m fully aware of everything thing he’s ever written, but doing so would make a lying, pretentious fop.
However, I am familiar with his best known short story called The Metamorphosis, thanks to reauired reading list in literary course in college. This odd little gem completely exemplifies everything that made Kafka’s “unique” style, Kafka’s “unique” style. This, like so much of his stuff, dealt with existentialism with an absurdist bent and THAT sums up The Metamorphosis in a nutshell.
If memory serves, the protagonist is young man who lives a very rigid life as a clerk of some sort, who likes to study train time time tables. It’s all he does; it’s what he lives for. So, Life and the supernatural, tag team him to teach his anti-social ass a lesson, by slowly turning into a huge dung beetle. His sole existence is ding this giant beetle is crammed in a tiny room, unable to move, surrounded by his beloved train schedules hanging on the walls and irony of ironies, he can’t read a single one.
Okay, here’s where the post gets good.
At 40, Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, walked through the park in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had misplaced her favorite doll. She and Kafka searched the park, but never found it. The child was understandably crestfallen. Kafka was moved by the child’s grief.
He told her to meet him at the park the next day. They
She e came, they searched but still found nothing…but at the end of another unsuccessful day, Kafka presented the girl with a letter “written” by the doll saying “please don’t cry. I took a trip to see the world. I’ll write to you about my adventures.”
Thus began a story which continued until the end of Kafka’s life. They continued to meet at the park regularly where Kafka would read the the letters he claimed have received from the doll. He regaled the child with the doll’s adventures from all over the globe. The little girl was enchanted.
Finally, Kafka bought a new doll and presented it to the little girl during one of regular meetings at the park.
She was disappointed at first, saying the new roll looked nothing like the one she’d lost, it Kafka was prepared for that possible response. He handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: “my travels have changed me.” The little girl hugged the new doll and took her home, happy as a weirdo clerk who loves train schedules.
Kafka dieda
Many years later, when the girl had become a woman, she found a letter Kafka had hidden inside the doll.
It read; “Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, feelings will return in another way.”
There are two morals of the story: 1) Embrace change. It’s inevitable for growth. With effort and sheer will, pain can eventually shift into wonder and love, but it’s up to us to consciously and intentionally create that connection.
And lastly, this story proves that a brilliantly warped imagination has no connection to a soul so heavily seeped in humanity. This proves the world can for some, create a bi-polar, dual view of life. It can be like a physically plain woman so good and kind, she’s beautiful. And it I can also be like a physically stunning woman with no heart, who’s so cruel and deceptive, she’s physically hideous. Repulsive.
Dung beetle ugly.
