Essay Archive - The Metamorphosis
The Metamorphosis
Kafka wrote "The Metamorphosis" in 1912, taking three weeks to compose
the story. While he had expressed earlier satisfaction with the work, he later
found it to be flawed, even calling the ending "unreadable." But whatever his
own opinion may have been, the short story has become one of the most popularly
read and analyzed works of twentieth-century literature. Isolation and
alienation are at the heart of this surreal story of a man transformed overnight
into a kind of beetle. In contrast to much of Kafka's fiction, "The
Metamorphosis" has not a sense of incompleteness. It is formally structured
i....
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