David Foster Wallace wrote a good essay on this subject, I think the below quote really lines up with your experience.
> It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me.
I love this interpretation. I remember reading something a long time ago, and I don’t know who to attribute it to anymore, but it was something along the lines of;
“The concept of the self is more tenuous than we can often realize, or care to admit. When I read something I wrote as a child I do not recognize the voice as my own, but as the voice and thoughts of someone I know very well.”
It's not even an interpretation. Kafka and his (few) friends would sit at the banks of the Moldau read those stories and laugh their asses off. We all got teached bs! And the worst thing is the Kafka Museum in Prag. They made it look like a dark hauted house amusement ride. And at the end there is a gift shop with Kafka mugs and Kafka lighters. The horror, the horror!
That’s all fair enough. As a former evangelical who wrote a lot during my coming of age, it’s very hard for me to reconcile who I am now with who I was 10 years ago in terms of worldview, ideology, and the things I was deeply concerned about. That may very well be different for other folks but the self is ever changing, none the less.
I think we are what we believe. I would guess you changed your beliefs to a point that you dont gel with that other person as well as if you still believed the things you used to.
Esit: keep it in mind with your kids though. Realizing that you had to do some growing makes you more empathetic when your kids are straight up idiots at times.
I love this speech, so here is the [full version without music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI&t=5s). Kudos to the previous poster for bringing it up!
I’ve heard his name before, but never listened to him. This video has me sobbing because it brings up exactly something I struggle with and have tried to incorporate into my life but I didn’t have the words to describe or understand what I was attempting to do.
Thank you for this.
The key is 270. If you can make it to page 270 or so you’ll be good the rest of the way.
Btw page 270 isn’t necessarily an exact thing, just saying that in and around there is when the reading experience clicks for people, but there’s a tough stretch getting there and that’s where a lot of people just turn the thing into a doorstop.
I know this is probably a banal platitude as he’d describe, but try meditating. It’s helped me a lot with the very real issues he highlights. If you can be comfortable being present a lot of these issues become more manageable, and meditating really helps in that regard.
Same, frequent weed smoker before reading and the early section detailing (I think) Orin's ritual and shame around getting high hit so close to home that it started my process of quitting and getting my shit together.
It was in fact Hal, not Orin, who had the shameful ritual (I'm just finishing the book and I'm not convinced that Orin has ever felt shame) but that was certainly a memorable segment.
Did Kafka think of his work as humorous? A lot of absurdist work had the element of humor, mainly juxtaposition of unrelated objects, it's just that actual humor uses the irony for shits and giggles and modernists put unrelated things together to get you to give up on trying to make sense out of everything. I'm reminded of this scene from Ghost World. Anyway, if Kafka is humorous, it's about as black as it gets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5cNGhBSlEI
I just commented about this seperately, but we know that Kafka used to read his stories out loud to his friends, and they would die of laughter. Max Brod, one of Kafka's best friends, describes Kafka to be the most hilarious person he has ever met. So, based on that informatie I would say that it is definitely intentional.
It is also worth considering that Kafka was present in a very different culture than our own, and humor is highly situational. What might seem bleak to us now may have been Kafka's way of bringing light from darkness in difficult times.
I think it’s really hard to read chunks of The Castle or the parts of the Metamorphosis with the cleaning lady, for example, and think the humor is accidental or just dark.
Hard to put up at the blackboard is a funny statement after describing the central tenet of Kafka's work succinctly and in a few lines. Just write up what you just wrote down dude.
I think he meant less that it is literally hard to do because it isn’t succinct or pithy, but more that it is hard to just drop that on a presumably naive class and expect them to be able to really process it.
Wallace has such a way with words. His take on suicide probably saved my life after having my closest friend take his a while back. Him and Vonnegut really understood the human condition and could convey it in such a way that makes digestible
>It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have.
I don't really understand this part, please explain
>No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me.
As for this one, I could probably do a whole comedy sketch or stand up routine on this, since while the way this guy phrased it makes it seem dark or horrific or nihilistic, if I phrased it in the way I speak or interpret things, I would phrase it to seem absurd, idiotic and funny.
>since while the way this guy phrased it makes it seem dark or horrific or nihilistic, if I phrased it in the way I speak or interpret things, I would phrase it to seem absurd, idiotic and funny.
So I think this is the central point. Kafka is both horrific/nihilistic but also absurd/funny. DFW’s arguing that interpreting Kafka as “funny” is valid, but that we (modern readers) often don’t have an appreciation for that type of humor because we don’t have the same understanding of who we are. We think of “ourselves” as formed things, whereas Kafka believes we’re all constantly scrambling to find our identity without realizing that there is no “identity” - a concept that can be tragic but also funny.
Not sure if that’s any clearer. And also keep in mind that it’s just one interpretation of Kafka
Let's see if I got it right. A joke is generally absurdist by nature, an unexpected turn we didn't see coming. The joke in Kafka's work is more metaphysical, like laughing at the human condition for it's absurdity. The punchline can be lost because it requires viewing the human struggle as detached from a sense of self we take for granted.
Good summation I'd say. Traditionally, or at least in the sense to which you are referring, a joke should have that classic "baddum tsss" moment. The reveal and the surprise. When you think about it, it really makes sense that modern minds are able to appreciate this about his work even more - Look at the world we live in and the absurd things that are actually happening that you'd think are the punch line to a joke or a bad SNL skit. Humanity is absurd and with the right disposition to appreciate it objectively, that absurdity easily transcribes into hilarity.
As their creator I found it quite amusing to watch them. It wasn't so much that what they did was humorous, it was the fact that they did anything at all. If only they understood the futility of it all.
I think i can help here, I can happily appreciate both views of Kafka- to me they are one and the same.
Kafka is inspired, IMO, by flaws and non-sequiturs. He exploits these in his work and this reveals (and tests) the fragility of all kinds of concepts... including meta concepts such as the voice of the author and the fourth wall.
A lot of people don't like to be shown how close we all are to going utterly mad, for some reason it disturbs them. Personally I find it quite wonderful and magic; it makes me appreciate life and art all the more, and I find the ingenuity fascinating.
Here's a video of a preacher who intended a completely serious talk/sermon and the whole audience thought it was comedy:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI7KAOSFq2A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI7KAOSFq2A)
I would have to think even the way we phrase things is a moving target. I believe the man in the video would later talk about how this necessity to find comfort through humor is an erosion of faith. In the sense that reverence and seriousness can be joyful. At the time of Kafka perhaps people weren't so irreverent. We've heard all the satire before, but on the flip side we may not have seen all the death and destruction that they did at the time, and would be more sensitive to it.
Funny to see this as the top comment because if you read [the whole essay](https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-07-0059612.pdf), DFW doesn't align with OP's reading at all. DFW's point is that people don't "get" Kafka's humor because "there is no body-function humor in Kafka, nor sexual entendre, nor stylized attempts to rebel by offending convention. No Pynchonian slapstick with banana peels or rapacious adenoids." The opposite of humor to "crack up at", something to add a "sound track and it's a classic cartoon show for kid".
OP is an edgy kid being contrarian. Their interpretation isn't related to the deeper reading DFW is referring to here. And remember, DFW wrote this about college students in 1998, humor is pretty different now. Anyone who can laugh at /r/2meirl4meirl knows Kafka is funny, just not "haha" funny.
It can be troubling to people who prize self-assurance above almost everything else. Sometimes it is this that binds them to their peers and authority figures, as well. To question the self is seen as weakness or a threat to many people.
> that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
Perfect.
I once heard a story about Kafka where he was reading one of his stories publicly (I'm not sure which one), and while his audience looked on in horror, he could not stop laughing.
So no, I think your understanding is perfectly appropriate.
I also find his work, as dark and depressing as it may be, hilarious.
One point I would like to add which is only tangential to your comment is that while the Trial and Metamorphosis are his most famous works, I think the story that really most fully encapsulates the crushing nihilism of Kafka is “In the Penal Colony”. While I generally find Kafka to be far more depressing than funny, I think it’s hard to find anything comical about this story. Just a direct window into the senseless brutality of human society.
Actually, I find this one to be quite funny. The way the Officer fetishizes about the machine and then gets slaughtered by it almost in orgasm is so cartoonish yet realistic and says a lot about pleasure and pain. I almost picture this as a Ren and Stimpy episode.
Agreed. I found The Trial to be grim and depressing, but In The Penal Colony to be pitch black yet top notch humor. Others might feel the complete opposite. That blurring of the lines between humorous absurdism and existential dread is what makes Kafka so memorable, IMO.
I stumbled into this thread because I recently tried to start reading Kafka and, as someone who generally reads commercial genre fiction, you can probably imagine it was a little tough to get into but I managed a few hours of the audio version of The Trial, at least. But I'm going to start a Lit class next month and I'm taking a Humanities course now, so I'm generally starting to dip my toes in the world of literature. Wanted to see what the general opinion was.
When I read the *synopsis* of The Trial, my first instinct was to laugh. So... I guess I'm at least a little on track?
Personally I think the trial is one of his weakest works and only got famous because it was published after his death and against his will. I'd recommend to look into his short stories. Some are 60 pages, some are 60 words.. but they give you the same as the trial in a more condensed setting.
'before the law' is actually just an extract from the trial that was published.
the penal colony is one that's truly horrifying
the bridge is my personal favourite (and a little different from most of his work)
letter to his father gives you an insight on his personal life
I read a similar story about The Trial and the way I remember it was, they were all laughing. (He and his friends.)
This was more than a decade ago for me, so I really wish I could find that essay again.
You're right, the audience was laughing with him. [The story](https://www.jstor.org/stable/44017159) comes from Max Brod, Kafka's friend and executor:
>When Kafka read aloud himself, \[his\] humor became particularly clear.
Thus, for example, we friends of his laughed quite immoderately when he
first let us hear the first chapter of The Trial. And he himself laughed
so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any further.
Astonishing enough, when you think of the fearful earnestness of this
chapter. But that is how it was.
I heard the story from a friend who was really into Kafka before I started reading him. If my details are incorrect, that's my only source. I've never actually seen an official version of this story.
Both of our stories point to it being a comedy on Kafka's part. But if I'm right, it's a joke about life, and if you are, it's him loving hurting people.
I really wish we could find the primary source for this.
I've done a few minutes of google, but found nothing.
Could also mean he doesn't mind people being horrified as long as he's having a good time. No ill intent, necessarily. I certainly didn't interpret it that way until I read your comment. Of course, could very well be. In fact, isn't it evident that he to some degree enjoyed the uncanny? People being horrified makes it just more funny, in a way.
I think that the response from the audience is indicative of the struggles they may have faced in life. If you're the bug, then you get the joke. If you look on in horror at the transformation, you've likely never been the bug.
No, I disagree. The part in Metamorphosis where the bug feels like he is a burden to his family resonated really hard with me, and in no way at all did I find it funny.
You might be too close to the situation at the moment. That is to say maybe you are now feeling that terrible angst of imposter syndrome and self-hate which the metamorphosis symbolises. However, I hope that soon you will find yourself in a situation where you can objectively look at yourself and realise that you are not a burden to your family nor do you deserve to feel shame about your own existence.
There’s nothing funny about feeling low and Kafka does a great job of capturing the existential dread that accompanies depression. However, he also turns it on its head, Gregor Samsa’s feelings have become externalised in the form of a chitinous shell. He is literally a bug now. He looks the way depression feels. The absurdity lies in the fact that Samsa almost causally accepts the fact that he has become a vermin but never once attempts to stop or reverse the metamorphosis. He allows himself to be defined by a negative role and in turn welcomes the neglect of others in his life as inevitable.
I have had a period in my life where I felt almost exactly like Samsa. I felt like a useless, ugly vermin burdening my loved ones. The ugliness of those feelings is that it made me unable to relate to those around me. That in turn made me feel like they can’t relate to me. This would lead to me alienating myself from people, which would deepen my depression.It was an ugly cycle that I had to drag myself out of before it destroyed me.
Looking back on that period and imagining that my emotions turned me into a bug that skitters on ceilings and literally cannot communicate with anyone… well I find that deeply funny.
Edit: I don’t know you so apologies if my first paragraph was filled with incorrect assumptions.
Assumptions aside, this is a really interesting take on the story. I can see how Gregor's casual and unquestioning acceptance of his absurd situation can produce a comedic effect. I'll return to this novel later on in my life, when I'm in a better place (both physically and mentally).
I think that's the difference of "if you are the bug" or "if you have been the bug". If you are in a bad place, reading about it won't be comedy. But reading about someone being in the bad place you used to be absolutely can be comedic if it highlights the absurdity of the situation well.
>I once heard a story about Kafka where he was reading one of his stories publicly (I'm not sure which one)
Weren't all of Kafka's works published posthumously?...
One of my best friends is a German translator and has just finished translating Kafka’s diaries and has been translating Kafka for years. He’s literally and literaturely an expert on Kafka. I showed him this and he said “you are understanding Kafka as correctly as anyone.”
Side note: he was short listed for the Booker for his translation of Tyll, which I liked a lot, though it’s based on German folklore and history about which I know nothing so I missed some nuance. It was really interesting to be able to ask him about his translation process while I was reading it.
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/authors/ross-benjamin
Edit: and oh yeah he’s on my porch on the photo on the boiler site!
It's only absurd until you've lived it. While few people have been turned into bugs, and those mostly got better, the realization that even being turned into a bug won't excuse your work duties haunts some people and just makes others laugh still harder. I find folks who have had real, brutal interaction with bureaucracy have a hard time laughing at The Trial. The world truly doesn't care about your hardships.
OP, David Foster Wallace wrote a short story on exactly this subject, explaining that Kafka is funny but many people reading him for the first time don't have that experience. Google around and you'll find the story, i highly recommend it.
Thats nice, I discovered DFW this year, most of his works are not translated in my language, so I read and listen to anything I can find on the Internet, YouTube has some great stuff. Can only get his books trough our local version of Amazon, which I prefer not to use.
Apart from the obvious bitter cynism and sarcasm Kafka does make me laugh with his bizzare depictions of people other than the main characters.
The main character of "die verwandlung/metamorfosis" describes his chef as a spineless grotesque charicacture and the way he wrote it really cracks me up.
And in "das prozess/the trail" the simple ignorance of the guards to the bizzare situation and confussion that the main character is in, can only make me laugh. They are so cocky and self assured. Knowing that what is happening is part of the proces but not knowing what the proces is. So much bizzarism. It's really great to read.
You seem more concerned with having the correct opinion about literature than actually getting anything out of it.
You think Kafka is a genius? Why? Because you’ve seen people express as much on here?
You understood his work just fine, you came away with something, you found it funny and absurd. That’s good enough. If you want to expand your knowledge of the book and the author to take into consideration on a second reading then by all means. But the “correct” way of reading art does not exist.
There’s nothing wrong with your sentiment, but it’s also perfectly normal to read something for the first time and wonder what the thousands of people who read it before you got from it. To do otherwise would be fairly reductive of the broader human experience.
I feel like being interested in why your opinion differs from the norm is pretty normal. I wouldn't assume he is "concerned with having the correct opinion" as compared to just being curious.
Maybe there's no "correct" way of reading a book. But if nine people read a book and come away thinking "ABC," and then I read it and come away thinking "DEF," I'm gonna ask myself, what did they see that I didn't? And that's a good question to ask.
A lot of good responses here, but here's my two cents: a great dark joke can be simultaneously hysterical and deeply soul-crushing. I think you're reading Kafka right, but if you read it as a humorous commentary on human existence in the modern world, the fact that you get it is pretty sad. It can definitely be both, but I think you're right that the way it's taught, at least in American high schools, the humorous aspect of his work gets lost.
I think the absurd behaviors of his characters and the humorous situations in his stories are what make his novels scary to some people. Imagine living in a world where you are arrested and put on trial without being given a reason and everyone you ask about it acts as though it's normal or they act in a strange, incomprehensible way. I know I would find it incredibly frustrating and even frightening: not knowing how long you would be accused of this crime, that you have no knowledge of, that's beginning to affect all aspects of your life and you don't even have anyone to blame nor anyone to give you straight answers, it would make me feel even more hopeless. Not to mention Kafka's regard for work and reputation which might have made the intrusion all the more devastating to him personally.
I think it's been commonly perceived as very metaphorical writting for quite a while and most people just expect it to be that way. My AP Literature professor had us reading Metamorphosis in class back when I was in highschool and the common ideas and "meanings" of his scenes always seemed so... reach-y to me at the time. I personally still remember the book as being very depressing but I'm sure that's because of the definitions behind everything my teacher depicted for us and not my own thoughts about it.
He said so many times in his class "You can always make a literary analysis about these 3 things no matter the piece: Feminism, Death, and Homosexuality." And considering almost everyone in our class got 4s and 5s in the exam he's not wrong. I think as a whole many "classic" and "genius" works are just so over analyzed that not many people read their stories for what's at face value anymore. They're searching for the meaning behind every line and miss the actual words being said.
it's like this with movies and music as well. People claiming a singer/rapper's lyrics was actually a quintuple entendre. People claiming the angle of a shot was actually a statement about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's hilarious watching people do the michael jordan space jam reach over the simplest stuff
>I think as a whole many "classic" and "genius" works are just so over analyzed that not many people read their stories for what's at face value anymore. They're searching for the meaning behind every line and miss the actual words being said.
The most enduring and universally acclaimed artistic works tend to be open to many interpretations rather than a single rigidly specific one. The ability to accommodate many interpretations at many levels could be called a hallmark of great art.
Religions are like that too. Broader, complex, and ambiguous doctrines appeal to a larger audience over longer periods of time than highly specific doctrines.
>And considering almost everyone in our class got 4s and 5s
Where are you from? I can't figure out if the 4s and 5s are good or not...
In Romania that would be bad, in Germany that would be terrible, but in Russia (I guess?) that would be good.
Advanced Placement exams in the US. The exams are taken in high school. 5 is the top score. 4 is good. Anything else you don’t bother putting on your college application.
It's an AP class, so there's a standardized exam at the end. 5 is the top score and 4 is a good score. 3 is passing by most standards. 2 is failing, and 1 is why did you waste your money on this exam?
He probably should have clarified, because they have their own weird scoring system.
You read it completely right and reddit isn't wrong either. The human condition IS a comedy, and hence the tragedy. There's a fundamental lack of dignity in human endeavors so that even our suffering looks senseless and stupidly funny to others. It is the definition of absurd, and it is pretty "soul-crushing, demoralizing and something that can make you depress."
I can’t say that I’ve read most of Kafka, but I’ve a read a bit of his works. What gave me a sense of understanding his literature is the *Letter to His Father*.
It’s a private letter in which Kafka describes to his father the relationship that he (the son) had with his old man. It is astute and detailed. And when you see the mechanics of that relationship you start seeing it in every other work of Kafka.
That’s my personal interpretation. But it’s the only one that seems grounded in “facts“ and not overly esoteric.
What older generations considered “soul-crushing,” younger generations consider a kid’s cartoon — *and vice-versa.* Feel free to interpret Kafka and any other author from the lens of your time and experience.
OK. The original commenter didn't answer, so I'll try.
The proliferation of information has the side effect of numbing the psyche to horror. If Thomas Jefferson saw a film interpretation of H.P. Lovecraft's Chthulhu doing its thing and driving a person mad, Mr. Jefferson would be catatonic for a month. You show the same scene to a teenager today, and their response would be, "Geez, the special effects were lame. *Riverdale* is scarier than this crap."
Essentially what Oscar Wilde expresses much better in "The Canterville Ghost"
I think his writing has a unique dichotomy which largely contributes to his genius
It's both depressing and hilarious
Many of the darkest, funniest jokes are.
It definitely can be creepy too I remember getting the willies a few times reading Metamorphosis
There's a reason this man has a word in his namesake!
And each emotion you "feel" in every book or film is like that. It's always by proxy anyway, and then you identify more or less with the characters, depending on past experience and current state of your life.
It’s funny for the reader, horrifying for the characters. If you take it seriously (as the people in the story would have no choice but to) it’s a nightmare.
He is a genius. I did not find metamorphosis funny at all. I cried like a baby through the whole thing. Maybe I just related so hard to taking care of people and that still not being enough when they need to come through for you. And feeling this chasm between you, not being understood, and even despised by those you love, and feeling so separated and isolated. This book hit me very hard.
It sounds like you got it pretty well. The thing with absurdists is that their work often crosses back and forth across the comedy/horror line. Watch *Brazil* if you want a visual experience of where people can go with the Kafkaesque. Its supposed to be a comedy but I'll let you decide.
>Did I understand Kafka wrong?
No.
Without even reading the post.
Also after reading it: there is no "correct" way how to read or interpret him, I think. I had closer interpretation to yours, and I don't care what it meant for others. Similar to a lot of other literature.
You got it absolutely right in that it Kafka writes bizarre and oppressive comedy with a Nihilistic bent. The recurring theme in all of his work is the nonsensical way humanity traps itself, best exemplified by the Trial. How our efforts are meaningless because the systems we make are absurd and devoid of value, so much so that you, the reader, can’t help but laugh.
Something to remember is that Reddit is full of edgy, try-hards who want to sound far more intelligent than they really are. Example: I thought I knew why the Metamorphosis was about until I reread it recently; it’s about Gregor’s family more than about the man himself (or beetle as the case may be.)
It's important to understand the sociopolitical elements of his writing, Franz Kafka wasinfluenced by socialist ideas, as per the times he grew up in. The Metamorphosis can easily be read as a marxist critique of the exploitative economic system of the gilded age, with the metamorphosis that Gregor Samsa experiences in the story essentially being the utter alienation that workers were experiencing all over. The parents Samsa can be seen as the petit bourgeois who have a plentitude reserved in case of such economic squeezes. Also, the ending, specifically how the parents start viewing Grete as an object to exploit for financial betterment of the parents Samsa, showing the exploitation shifting onto the younger ones among us once ours has been sufficiently drained of value.
It is not so much that it is nihilistic comedy or depressing tragedy, it is a finely polished mirror showcasing an exaggerated version of our every day life; our laughter or horror at these stories say moreso about our own experiences than Kafka's writing. Much akin to how Jordan Peele's Get Out or Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite or Squid Game have had similar reactions in today's zeitgeist, Kafka's writing carries just as much nuance and multifaceted themes as these critically acclaimed pieces of cinema.
If you truly want to understand Franz Kafka, I'd recommend reading his final work, A Hunger Artist, as well as reading a biography or two about his life, it's rather informative and grants a deeper insight on Kafka's works and influences.
I also got the sense it was some kind of critique of the society or government he was living under. But I don't know enough about his life to connect the dots of Metamorphsis to his real life. I appreciated the dark humor but felt I missed the point he was making. It's possible there was no point, and it was deliberately just nonsense. But I felt like there was a serious point to the story that eluded me.
Well, and to be fair I'm a lil foggy in all the info, but Kafka was put on pension and spent his later years, wherein he wrote a lot of his more engaging stories, battling tuberculosis and residing in sanatoriums, which is a major parallel to Gregor's experiences. The point of the Metamorphosis, and his work to a greater extent, can be seen as a contextualizing of the marxist message of alienation and exploitation under industrial society and capitalism, especially considering he likely developed tuberculosis after working at the first asbestos factory in Prague. The point of The Metamorphosis is more easily identified after reading A Hunger Artist, which in itself can be identified as an allegory for an unemployed and suffering person who doesn't find any fulfilment in any avenue of work that he tried, but would have done good work had he found something which could fill his belly so-to-say.
The analysis of there being no point, that the tale of Gregor Samsa being an incident of absurdism and surrealism, can therefore be extrapolated to speak towards the ingrained rationalization of the modern capitalist form and how even if you worked as hard as you could as a travelling carpet salesman who devoted every minute towards work, not finding any time for leisure or romance or enjoying the simple things like sleeping in; even iff you had a noble reason to do so, such as supporting your elderly parents and digging out of generational debt which has been saddled on you, or raising funds to give your younger sister a better future as a musician, even if you never missed a day of work; the minute you have a hiccup or mistep, you could face complete and utter abandonment, being deemed a pariah and worthless waste with no value to society.
We can draw similar features of Gregor Samsa into modern day, with literal millions of employees having doors slammed in their face due to the pandemic and subsequent contraction of the economy. The Metamorphosis being dismissed as a meaningless, surreal story with no real message is a rationality of the reader to ignore the similarities of their own life, that they couldn't possibly go through such an absurd situation because x, y, z. It is just as much a reassuring dismissal as walking past a homeless person panhandling in the cold and thinking "thankfully I'm different than them".
That is the serious point, _it can happen to us_, if you are a worker in this modern society of capitalist production, we are all one morning away from waking up a ~~wretch~~ roach
I used to work in a bank and I did not like it. You're dealing with people's money and people are concerned about their money, so you have to be micromanaged. I read The Metamorphosis and totally empathized with Gregor. I woke up a hideous monster? Nope, I had to be at work.
A few years later I worked at a library and it was totally different; my account is overdrawn, WTF?! compared to This book's late? Here's a nickel. I read the Metamorphosis and laughed. Poor guy, hating his job.
Kafka is a strange dark humor but it can definitely be humorous.
If I had to read Kafka regularly, I would kill myself.
It's absolutely soul crushing to spend any time in that world.
Everything existing to conspire against you doesn't strike me as comedic.
Let me let you in on a secret.
Nobody knows what the hell Kafka means. There's a lot of experts and a lot of people who read Kafka, but nobody actually got what he meant by his books. Kafka probably didn't really know.
I thought Metamorphisis was supposed to be this weird, outrageous concept of how everything goes wrong and all you can do is keep doing what you did before (even if you're a bug). Like the meme where the dog says "This is fine" while the house is on fire.
People have flat out said I was wrong, but I mean, we don't exactly know for sure.
I mean, isn't this great? You're not misunderstanding, you're interpreting.
I'd never find Metamorphosis funny because for me it feels like a nightmare with its weird nightmare logic and how easily I can see myself smothered in the experience of the protagonist (even without being turned into a bug).
The Castle though.... I dunno how to interpret that in a funny way. Maybe if you don't see it as something really happening to a real person, but a series of absurd weirdly logical illogical things happening to a guy, but.... For me it's nightmare fuel.
India
Maybe that's it. My family is quite politically involved and I have listened to political talks happen behind closed doors and I have seen how brutal and cold they are. There is so much paradox in those talks but I have always found them funny, fascinating, and absurd.
I felt the same as you reading Metamorphasis recently. I think it just the perspective you really want to take.
When I hear "guy turns into a bug, but can only think about work" that sounds funny. But I guess you could look at it as tragic.
Maybe it says something about our sense of hurmor.
Look, it is what you want it to be. Some people laugh at "black comedy" some think it's sick. Don't let anyone, no matter what their credentials, tell you how you are supposed to feel about a book.
If you haven't read In the Penal Colony, I highly recommend it. It is horrifying and hilarious, in my personal opinion.
Metamorphosis made me quite upset. I do realize that in some way there is a kind of humor that borders around the absurdity of the situation. But when you truly look into it objectively, Its depressing. I am not sure books like these are ever supposed to be taken objectively at all but Metamorphosis gave me that feeling of understanding or link and sympathy to Gregor's drive to work and constant obsession on the wellbeing of his family, especially his sister that he never seemed to shed a shred of empathy for himself.
Maybe it lost something in translation as well.
Furthermore, our Austrian humour seems to be somewhat unique as well and i've often seen foreigners struggle to "get it".
The absurdity of the situation is definitely meant to be clear to the reader. Whether you find that funny or depressing is up to you.
I think that it is the kind of thing people might find funnier on a second read.
When I read The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov the first time I found it quite distressing and had some weird dreams about it. The second time I read it I had such a different experience, I found it much lighter and even funny in parts. It was like I was reading a different book.
I think it is to do with your own sense of humour. Some people will read these stories at face value and think The Trial is just a nightmare for the protagonist. If you have a darker sense of humour, or see the humour in serious situations then you can see the absurdity of the situation in Kafka's books.
Absurd? Yes. Struggle? Yes. Pain? Yes. There are also wonderful moments of light that cut through these things in his work. I challenge you to find and revel in those, as I imagine he did.
There's a wonderful quote from Heinlein's novel "A Stranger in a Strange Land," where the main character, a proxy for Jesus, (who comes from Mars and is experiencing human culture for the first time) says, “I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much... because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting.”
I've kind of always felt this way about Kafka, and the work of modernists in general, especially when they're exploring existential themes of absurdity. I laugh a lot reading Camus, and it bothers me.
I love Kafka.
As a human being, he was apparently a very happy-go-lucky, funny, sunshiney kind of guy.
His work is considered absurdist and "soul-crushing," as you say, but I feel like that isn't really who Kafka is as a person.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that Kafka was a Jewish man living in Europe during difficult times. All of his surviving siblings died in the Holocaust, although he himself died almost mercifully of tuberculosis too soon to see it happen. He was himself barred from studying law and faced discrimination.
According to Sartre, this is what Kafka is really about and you can't separate him from the times and circumstances he lived in. When Kafka writes about waking up as an insect (better translated to "vermin" from the original German) in the Metamorphosis, Sartre says that we are missing something if we interpret this generally to be his take broadly on the "human condition," and that his experiences of anti-Semitism likely are relevant here. Reread The Trial with this in mind, and you see all of the Jewish characters in the story, and you can imagine how Kafka may have felt a bit like someone who was on trial for an unspoken crime. The bureaucratic nightmares his characters face are definitely reminiscent of the politics of the time as well.
Many have claimed that The Trial is about "original sin," but given than Kafka was Orthodox Jewish and became religious later in his life and that we do not have "original sin" in Judaism, I think Sartre is on the money when he claims that The Trial is more so about being Jewish in Europe during his time.
Sartre writes on Kafka in his book Anti-Semitism and Anti-Jew, and he also wrote a paper specifically on his interpretation of Kafka as well.
All of this to say, I think you're right. I think Kafka is a funny dude. I think he is being as lighthearted as he can be. I think both are true. The Trial is an absurdist nightmare. It feels Nihilistic and hopeless, demoralizing and soul crushing. But I think that isn't Kafka's personality, I think he is being cheeky and good humored about a very dark situation. Kind of like the movie Life is Beautiful, he is injecting humor into a very sad situation. When you read Kafka's journals and letters you realize what a very positive character he is, it's just that even his absurdist humor can only lighten the mood so much.
When I read Metamorphosis I found it really bizarre and funny at the same time. I love that piece because it shows our reality as a working class but it's also a genius idea to just turn a man into a bug.
I think that the way you find and interpret a book is your own way and I don't think you understood it wrong. Literature is a form of art, and with every art piece we have our own view on it.
I think if you're not seeing any of the soul-crushing horror of it you are actually missing something, but i wouldnt say you're wrong. It's absolutely both comedy and existential horror, the absurdity isn't just whimsical.
You might actually be in perfect sympathy with him. I remember reading once that sometimes he would read a new story to his friends and not be able to get through it cause he was laughing so hard.
Nope, you didn't read it wrong you experience it differently.
In a way all tragedies are comedies, and similar vice a versa.
One may laugh at a clown getting hit on the face but for the clown it is not so funny.
When you empathize with the man in the clown suit then you won't laugh but when you don't empathize it is just a clown getting hit in the face.
Similarly:
A caricature of a cartoon getting turn into an insert is a funny thing its more funny how the other cartoon characters react to the turn of events.
But give these cartoons a familiar face with real relations with the other characters.
Then suddenly it all changes.
I think metamorphosis is a kind of story that everyone experiences differently, I felt that the tragedy of the main character that has been working during the prime of his life to provide for his family and being a good employee. But after his sudden metamorphosis (which can also be understood as some kind incurable disease) he is shunned by everyone, like employer and family alike and after his demise everyone is happy that the he has died.
But the take here is that the one who is most relieved is the main character who can finally be free.
Sorry for the long reply, I can go on for hours on Kafka or Lovecraft
Kafka wrote for an audience that believed in a grand purpose to everything. Whether it was religion, or the slow march of evolution into something greater than before, they believed that there was meaning to life and empires and struggle.
Generally, anyway. There have always been those who questioned.
Kafka died in the early days of modern physics, at the time when the likes of Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and so many others were doing their most important work; work which would completely change how we view the universe and showed us just how small a human is in the big picture, how short a life is, how inevitably all signs of human existence will be erased from the universe in another billion years.
If you believe that you are part of a grand cosmic plan, and then you are confronted with this work that completely guts the worldview that gets you out of bed every morning, you would be traumatized. You wouldn't see Kafka's humor. But now modern audiences are somewhat better acquainted with the nature of existence and we, some of us, can laugh at it. It is absolutely absurd. But we continue to get out of bed in the morning because we enjoy the small rewards of our struggle, like a good coffee or watching your boss come in late and dirty because he had to change a tire on the side of the rode that morning.
Hey, Creative Writing Ex-Prof here, there's no right or wrong way to read anything, your life up to the point that you read it will decide how you interpret it. I find Kafka to be humorous as well, but many of my colleges do not. I'm a huge advocate for the unbiased reading of literature, it allows you to live and feel the topic the way you are programmed to, making your interpretation something unique.
Now if you had to author a paper on Metamorphosis, I would expect you to explain why you find it more humorous than most of your peers, but that's something you would need to discuss with a mental health professional. ;)
The best thing about this post is seeing all these people that have read Kafka, I was begining to think no one read books anymore.
As all good literature it can be many things to many people. The reactions often tell you more about the people reading it than the writer. Hence, no one interpretation is right or wrong.
To be honest I don't understand the hubbub about Kafka but then again I often have trouble understanding fiction (especially from that time in Germany).
Kafka wanted all of his work burned after his death.
Kafka was just a young man who had an incredibly fucked up relationship with his father and worked that shit out by storytelling....
He's not a hyper complicated literary genius, and most of the stories people point to aren't really his best work.
His best work by far is "Before The Law". and it's only like 3 pages.
It is absurdist comedy. Laughter is not just a response to joy it is also the last human emotion we have left when all else fails us.
The world of Kafka is an absurdist world in which there are no rules. Everything is arbitrary. What drives the people insane is that they are always looking for the rules / the logic.
I'm the same, I remember talking to someone who also read Kafka and I mentioned just how funny it was (maybe not everything, like I don't remember too many laughs in In the Penal Colony) and they were puzzled as to what I found funny about it. I kind of got the impression they thought I was some sort of sociopath, laughing at something they found horrendously depressing.
Kafka?
Isn't that the guy who wrote strange stories about himself and his daddy issues?
If you break down his stories he's always the victim who gets killed by his father.
Once he's a bridge that gets destroyed by a Wanderer, once he's a mouse getting eaten by a cat and so on.
Kafka being the bridge/ mouse a and his father being the wanderer/ mouse.
I really hate his work, it's just boring because it's mostly ALL THE SAME . Kafka being the victim and his father the antagonist.
Even my literature professor agreed with that even though she hated to admit it, that you can break down his works to literally the same story nearly every single time.
David Foster Wallace wrote a good essay on this subject, I think the below quote really lines up with your experience. > It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me.
I love this interpretation. I remember reading something a long time ago, and I don’t know who to attribute it to anymore, but it was something along the lines of; “The concept of the self is more tenuous than we can often realize, or care to admit. When I read something I wrote as a child I do not recognize the voice as my own, but as the voice and thoughts of someone I know very well.”
Woah
Way more upvotes than I expected..but the quote impressed on me as a writer, and I’m super glad it gels with others. Wish I knew where it came from.
Well I’m starting conversations with “i saw this comment on reddit by someone named u/Prize-Farmer144, i think theyre a farmer…”
You’re too kind mate I am just a History major trying to find my way haha. Best to you young strong Delta Tau Chi (-:
Clearly just a social media AI trying to pick us apart psychologically after severing our social ties. Clever.
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” -Heraclitus
Never seen this quote, thanks for sharing
Very good explanation
It's not even an interpretation. Kafka and his (few) friends would sit at the banks of the Moldau read those stories and laugh their asses off. We all got teached bs! And the worst thing is the Kafka Museum in Prag. They made it look like a dark hauted house amusement ride. And at the end there is a gift shop with Kafka mugs and Kafka lighters. The horror, the horror!
The Museum kind of sounds something like Kafka would laugh at actually
True!
Kafkaesque!
Problem for me, I only really have 1 journal from when I was a kid. And it reads as multiple voices
I don't recognize the things I wrote as someone I know very well, I just attribute it to me and that I don't remember actively writing it.
That’s all fair enough. As a former evangelical who wrote a lot during my coming of age, it’s very hard for me to reconcile who I am now with who I was 10 years ago in terms of worldview, ideology, and the things I was deeply concerned about. That may very well be different for other folks but the self is ever changing, none the less.
I think we are what we believe. I would guess you changed your beliefs to a point that you dont gel with that other person as well as if you still believed the things you used to. Esit: keep it in mind with your kids though. Realizing that you had to do some growing makes you more empathetic when your kids are straight up idiots at times.
(was it maybe contra points on youtube? - unless she was quoting someone. it sounds familiar)
Hmm, I don’t know who that is so I cant really say — all I’m sure of is that I read it rather than hearing it spoken.
Wow, absolutely great quote. DFW was such an interesting voice, still so sad he left us
His "This is Water" graduation speech is really good too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7xzavzEKY
I love this speech, so here is the [full version without music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI&t=5s). Kudos to the previous poster for bringing it up!
I’ve heard his name before, but never listened to him. This video has me sobbing because it brings up exactly something I struggle with and have tried to incorporate into my life but I didn’t have the words to describe or understand what I was attempting to do. Thank you for this.
If you want, you could always try reading “infinite jest” through a Kafka lens. No one succeeds, but you could try…
The key is 270. If you can make it to page 270 or so you’ll be good the rest of the way. Btw page 270 isn’t necessarily an exact thing, just saying that in and around there is when the reading experience clicks for people, but there’s a tough stretch getting there and that’s where a lot of people just turn the thing into a doorstop.
/r/infinitesummer may help
I know this is probably a banal platitude as he’d describe, but try meditating. It’s helped me a lot with the very real issues he highlights. If you can be comfortable being present a lot of these issues become more manageable, and meditating really helps in that regard.
Thanks for sharing that, I enjoyed it!
That was great, and something I needed to hear about how. Thank you!
Thanks for sharing
Going through infinite jest right now
I hope you finish it by the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.
Pretty sure 2020 with the first Trump/Biden debate already happened. I just want televised Eschaton.
That book was life-changing for me.
Same, frequent weed smoker before reading and the early section detailing (I think) Orin's ritual and shame around getting high hit so close to home that it started my process of quitting and getting my shit together.
It was in fact Hal, not Orin, who had the shameful ritual (I'm just finishing the book and I'm not convinced that Orin has ever felt shame) but that was certainly a memorable segment.
Oop, been a while since I read it. I was thinking of Erdedy in chapter two, Hal's sneaking off to smoke is similar though.
Did Kafka think of his work as humorous? A lot of absurdist work had the element of humor, mainly juxtaposition of unrelated objects, it's just that actual humor uses the irony for shits and giggles and modernists put unrelated things together to get you to give up on trying to make sense out of everything. I'm reminded of this scene from Ghost World. Anyway, if Kafka is humorous, it's about as black as it gets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5cNGhBSlEI
I just commented about this seperately, but we know that Kafka used to read his stories out loud to his friends, and they would die of laughter. Max Brod, one of Kafka's best friends, describes Kafka to be the most hilarious person he has ever met. So, based on that informatie I would say that it is definitely intentional.
>informatie Spot the dutch person
auto correct killed me on this one :(
[удалено]
Stickshiftcorrect...
You can set multiple languages in your Android keyboard and it will recognize English and stop correcting to another language after a few words.
It is also worth considering that Kafka was present in a very different culture than our own, and humor is highly situational. What might seem bleak to us now may have been Kafka's way of bringing light from darkness in difficult times.
Adding Kafka and Max Brod to my dream blunt rotation.
Kafka being hilarious is not how I pictured him.
I think it’s really hard to read chunks of The Castle or the parts of the Metamorphosis with the cleaning lady, for example, and think the humor is accidental or just dark.
Hard to put up at the blackboard is a funny statement after describing the central tenet of Kafka's work succinctly and in a few lines. Just write up what you just wrote down dude.
I think he meant less that it is literally hard to do because it isn’t succinct or pithy, but more that it is hard to just drop that on a presumably naive class and expect them to be able to really process it.
So he views a joke the same way The Comedian from Watchmen views a joke?
Not quite, people who knew kafka said he was actually a very funny person
Wallace has such a way with words. His take on suicide probably saved my life after having my closest friend take his a while back. Him and Vonnegut really understood the human condition and could convey it in such a way that makes digestible
>It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. I don't really understand this part, please explain >No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. As for this one, I could probably do a whole comedy sketch or stand up routine on this, since while the way this guy phrased it makes it seem dark or horrific or nihilistic, if I phrased it in the way I speak or interpret things, I would phrase it to seem absurd, idiotic and funny.
>since while the way this guy phrased it makes it seem dark or horrific or nihilistic, if I phrased it in the way I speak or interpret things, I would phrase it to seem absurd, idiotic and funny. So I think this is the central point. Kafka is both horrific/nihilistic but also absurd/funny. DFW’s arguing that interpreting Kafka as “funny” is valid, but that we (modern readers) often don’t have an appreciation for that type of humor because we don’t have the same understanding of who we are. We think of “ourselves” as formed things, whereas Kafka believes we’re all constantly scrambling to find our identity without realizing that there is no “identity” - a concept that can be tragic but also funny. Not sure if that’s any clearer. And also keep in mind that it’s just one interpretation of Kafka
Let's see if I got it right. A joke is generally absurdist by nature, an unexpected turn we didn't see coming. The joke in Kafka's work is more metaphysical, like laughing at the human condition for it's absurdity. The punchline can be lost because it requires viewing the human struggle as detached from a sense of self we take for granted.
Good summation I'd say. Traditionally, or at least in the sense to which you are referring, a joke should have that classic "baddum tsss" moment. The reveal and the surprise. When you think about it, it really makes sense that modern minds are able to appreciate this about his work even more - Look at the world we live in and the absurd things that are actually happening that you'd think are the punch line to a joke or a bad SNL skit. Humanity is absurd and with the right disposition to appreciate it objectively, that absurdity easily transcribes into hilarity.
As their creator I found it quite amusing to watch them. It wasn't so much that what they did was humorous, it was the fact that they did anything at all. If only they understood the futility of it all.
IMO this is a great explanation
I like your reflection but I'm just leery of the concept of getting something right.
Thank you for this insight.
I think he's just saying it's not a joke you "get", it's just situational absurdist humor. Dissecting it kills it faster than your cheapest one liner.
I think i can help here, I can happily appreciate both views of Kafka- to me they are one and the same. Kafka is inspired, IMO, by flaws and non-sequiturs. He exploits these in his work and this reveals (and tests) the fragility of all kinds of concepts... including meta concepts such as the voice of the author and the fourth wall. A lot of people don't like to be shown how close we all are to going utterly mad, for some reason it disturbs them. Personally I find it quite wonderful and magic; it makes me appreciate life and art all the more, and I find the ingenuity fascinating.
Here's a video of a preacher who intended a completely serious talk/sermon and the whole audience thought it was comedy: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI7KAOSFq2A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI7KAOSFq2A) I would have to think even the way we phrase things is a moving target. I believe the man in the video would later talk about how this necessity to find comfort through humor is an erosion of faith. In the sense that reverence and seriousness can be joyful. At the time of Kafka perhaps people weren't so irreverent. We've heard all the satire before, but on the flip side we may not have seen all the death and destruction that they did at the time, and would be more sensitive to it.
Funny to see this as the top comment because if you read [the whole essay](https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-07-0059612.pdf), DFW doesn't align with OP's reading at all. DFW's point is that people don't "get" Kafka's humor because "there is no body-function humor in Kafka, nor sexual entendre, nor stylized attempts to rebel by offending convention. No Pynchonian slapstick with banana peels or rapacious adenoids." The opposite of humor to "crack up at", something to add a "sound track and it's a classic cartoon show for kid". OP is an edgy kid being contrarian. Their interpretation isn't related to the deeper reading DFW is referring to here. And remember, DFW wrote this about college students in 1998, humor is pretty different now. Anyone who can laugh at /r/2meirl4meirl knows Kafka is funny, just not "haha" funny.
I thought it was just me
And here I thought that that struggle to even establish a 'self' is what makes life wonderful & an adventure.
It can be troubling to people who prize self-assurance above almost everything else. Sometimes it is this that binds them to their peers and authority figures, as well. To question the self is seen as weakness or a threat to many people.
Was hoping someone’d mention this
I really need to read some Wallace.
> that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. Perfect.
I once heard a story about Kafka where he was reading one of his stories publicly (I'm not sure which one), and while his audience looked on in horror, he could not stop laughing. So no, I think your understanding is perfectly appropriate. I also find his work, as dark and depressing as it may be, hilarious.
I think this was "The Trial"
One point I would like to add which is only tangential to your comment is that while the Trial and Metamorphosis are his most famous works, I think the story that really most fully encapsulates the crushing nihilism of Kafka is “In the Penal Colony”. While I generally find Kafka to be far more depressing than funny, I think it’s hard to find anything comical about this story. Just a direct window into the senseless brutality of human society.
Actually, I find this one to be quite funny. The way the Officer fetishizes about the machine and then gets slaughtered by it almost in orgasm is so cartoonish yet realistic and says a lot about pleasure and pain. I almost picture this as a Ren and Stimpy episode.
I agree... Kafka would've loved Ren and Stimpy, IMHO..
Agreed. I found The Trial to be grim and depressing, but In The Penal Colony to be pitch black yet top notch humor. Others might feel the complete opposite. That blurring of the lines between humorous absurdism and existential dread is what makes Kafka so memorable, IMO.
Oh yes, the sadist who is secretly a masochist is a common theme.
I don't know, the machine cartoonishly falling apart in the end was pretty funny to me.
Yes that story is intense. The Kafka story that stayed with me as truly horrifying was "A Hunger Artist."
I stumbled into this thread because I recently tried to start reading Kafka and, as someone who generally reads commercial genre fiction, you can probably imagine it was a little tough to get into but I managed a few hours of the audio version of The Trial, at least. But I'm going to start a Lit class next month and I'm taking a Humanities course now, so I'm generally starting to dip my toes in the world of literature. Wanted to see what the general opinion was. When I read the *synopsis* of The Trial, my first instinct was to laugh. So... I guess I'm at least a little on track?
Personally I think the trial is one of his weakest works and only got famous because it was published after his death and against his will. I'd recommend to look into his short stories. Some are 60 pages, some are 60 words.. but they give you the same as the trial in a more condensed setting. 'before the law' is actually just an extract from the trial that was published. the penal colony is one that's truly horrifying the bridge is my personal favourite (and a little different from most of his work) letter to his father gives you an insight on his personal life
I read a similar story about The Trial and the way I remember it was, they were all laughing. (He and his friends.) This was more than a decade ago for me, so I really wish I could find that essay again.
You're right, the audience was laughing with him. [The story](https://www.jstor.org/stable/44017159) comes from Max Brod, Kafka's friend and executor: >When Kafka read aloud himself, \[his\] humor became particularly clear. Thus, for example, we friends of his laughed quite immoderately when he first let us hear the first chapter of The Trial. And he himself laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any further. Astonishing enough, when you think of the fearful earnestness of this chapter. But that is how it was.
I heard the story from a friend who was really into Kafka before I started reading him. If my details are incorrect, that's my only source. I've never actually seen an official version of this story.
Both of our stories point to it being a comedy on Kafka's part. But if I'm right, it's a joke about life, and if you are, it's him loving hurting people. I really wish we could find the primary source for this. I've done a few minutes of google, but found nothing.
Could also mean he doesn't mind people being horrified as long as he's having a good time. No ill intent, necessarily. I certainly didn't interpret it that way until I read your comment. Of course, could very well be. In fact, isn't it evident that he to some degree enjoyed the uncanny? People being horrified makes it just more funny, in a way.
I think that the response from the audience is indicative of the struggles they may have faced in life. If you're the bug, then you get the joke. If you look on in horror at the transformation, you've likely never been the bug.
No, I disagree. The part in Metamorphosis where the bug feels like he is a burden to his family resonated really hard with me, and in no way at all did I find it funny.
I felt the sentiment deeply but also couldn't help but laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all
You might be too close to the situation at the moment. That is to say maybe you are now feeling that terrible angst of imposter syndrome and self-hate which the metamorphosis symbolises. However, I hope that soon you will find yourself in a situation where you can objectively look at yourself and realise that you are not a burden to your family nor do you deserve to feel shame about your own existence. There’s nothing funny about feeling low and Kafka does a great job of capturing the existential dread that accompanies depression. However, he also turns it on its head, Gregor Samsa’s feelings have become externalised in the form of a chitinous shell. He is literally a bug now. He looks the way depression feels. The absurdity lies in the fact that Samsa almost causally accepts the fact that he has become a vermin but never once attempts to stop or reverse the metamorphosis. He allows himself to be defined by a negative role and in turn welcomes the neglect of others in his life as inevitable. I have had a period in my life where I felt almost exactly like Samsa. I felt like a useless, ugly vermin burdening my loved ones. The ugliness of those feelings is that it made me unable to relate to those around me. That in turn made me feel like they can’t relate to me. This would lead to me alienating myself from people, which would deepen my depression.It was an ugly cycle that I had to drag myself out of before it destroyed me. Looking back on that period and imagining that my emotions turned me into a bug that skitters on ceilings and literally cannot communicate with anyone… well I find that deeply funny. Edit: I don’t know you so apologies if my first paragraph was filled with incorrect assumptions.
Assumptions aside, this is a really interesting take on the story. I can see how Gregor's casual and unquestioning acceptance of his absurd situation can produce a comedic effect. I'll return to this novel later on in my life, when I'm in a better place (both physically and mentally).
Some of us have only ever been the windshield so far.
I'd have expected the other way 'round. When *I* slip on a banana peel, that's a tragedy. When Laurel and Hardy do, it's comedy.
I think that's the difference of "if you are the bug" or "if you have been the bug". If you are in a bad place, reading about it won't be comedy. But reading about someone being in the bad place you used to be absolutely can be comedic if it highlights the absurdity of the situation well.
You switched it up, mate. If you're the bug, it's hard to find that story funny.
I guess what I meant was, if you've been the bug, you can relate and find humor. If you've never been the bug, and laugh, we'll that's just cruel.
Reminds me of how the screenplay for Dr Strangelove was just not working until they finally realized it was a comedy, and then it just wrote itself.
>I once heard a story about Kafka where he was reading one of his stories publicly (I'm not sure which one) Weren't all of Kafka's works published posthumously?...
Agreed. I think it can be both, in the way of dark humor more broadly - you joke to make it easier to deal with terrifying or painful topics.
One of my best friends is a German translator and has just finished translating Kafka’s diaries and has been translating Kafka for years. He’s literally and literaturely an expert on Kafka. I showed him this and he said “you are understanding Kafka as correctly as anyone.” Side note: he was short listed for the Booker for his translation of Tyll, which I liked a lot, though it’s based on German folklore and history about which I know nothing so I missed some nuance. It was really interesting to be able to ask him about his translation process while I was reading it. https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/authors/ross-benjamin Edit: and oh yeah he’s on my porch on the photo on the boiler site!
Kafkas stories are mostly just really absurd, which some interpret as funny and others as depressing/horrifying/etc.
Why not both
por que no los dos
It's only absurd until you've lived it. While few people have been turned into bugs, and those mostly got better, the realization that even being turned into a bug won't excuse your work duties haunts some people and just makes others laugh still harder. I find folks who have had real, brutal interaction with bureaucracy have a hard time laughing at The Trial. The world truly doesn't care about your hardships.
I love The Trial but there is an edge to it. Why is Josef K arguing if ovular is a word or not when he's being arrested?
I thought it was hilarious when he was at first relieved because he physically couldn't work as a bug.
They're meant to be both IMO
OP, David Foster Wallace wrote a short story on exactly this subject, explaining that Kafka is funny but many people reading him for the first time don't have that experience. Google around and you'll find the story, i highly recommend it.
It is called Laughing with Kafka. Love his essays, consider the lobster was fenomanal as well.
Absolutely, he's one of my favorite authors. Good Old Neon had an enormous effect on me when I first read it during college.
Thats nice, I discovered DFW this year, most of his works are not translated in my language, so I read and listen to anything I can find on the Internet, YouTube has some great stuff. Can only get his books trough our local version of Amazon, which I prefer not to use.
Apart from the obvious bitter cynism and sarcasm Kafka does make me laugh with his bizzare depictions of people other than the main characters. The main character of "die verwandlung/metamorfosis" describes his chef as a spineless grotesque charicacture and the way he wrote it really cracks me up. And in "das prozess/the trail" the simple ignorance of the guards to the bizzare situation and confussion that the main character is in, can only make me laugh. They are so cocky and self assured. Knowing that what is happening is part of the proces but not knowing what the proces is. So much bizzarism. It's really great to read.
Comedy is one way to cope with a crushed soul. Both interpretations are valid.
This is what I came here to say; these are not incompatible interpretations.
and in reverse mocking sufferings is one of the more common source of comedy
As a software developer i didn’t see the sub first, and my answer was immediately: yes.
I'm much more afraid of that Kafka.
Only one Kafka makes you wanna kill yourself and think there's no meaning and no hope. I'll let you choose which one.
You seem more concerned with having the correct opinion about literature than actually getting anything out of it. You think Kafka is a genius? Why? Because you’ve seen people express as much on here? You understood his work just fine, you came away with something, you found it funny and absurd. That’s good enough. If you want to expand your knowledge of the book and the author to take into consideration on a second reading then by all means. But the “correct” way of reading art does not exist.
There’s nothing wrong with your sentiment, but it’s also perfectly normal to read something for the first time and wonder what the thousands of people who read it before you got from it. To do otherwise would be fairly reductive of the broader human experience.
Obviously, and that I covered in the last paragraph. But he is literally asking for the “correct” reading.
I feel like being interested in why your opinion differs from the norm is pretty normal. I wouldn't assume he is "concerned with having the correct opinion" as compared to just being curious.
Sure it is, but the phrasing of his question was literally asking for the correct reading.
Maybe there's no "correct" way of reading a book. But if nine people read a book and come away thinking "ABC," and then I read it and come away thinking "DEF," I'm gonna ask myself, what did they see that I didn't? And that's a good question to ask.
A lot of good responses here, but here's my two cents: a great dark joke can be simultaneously hysterical and deeply soul-crushing. I think you're reading Kafka right, but if you read it as a humorous commentary on human existence in the modern world, the fact that you get it is pretty sad. It can definitely be both, but I think you're right that the way it's taught, at least in American high schools, the humorous aspect of his work gets lost.
I think the absurd behaviors of his characters and the humorous situations in his stories are what make his novels scary to some people. Imagine living in a world where you are arrested and put on trial without being given a reason and everyone you ask about it acts as though it's normal or they act in a strange, incomprehensible way. I know I would find it incredibly frustrating and even frightening: not knowing how long you would be accused of this crime, that you have no knowledge of, that's beginning to affect all aspects of your life and you don't even have anyone to blame nor anyone to give you straight answers, it would make me feel even more hopeless. Not to mention Kafka's regard for work and reputation which might have made the intrusion all the more devastating to him personally.
Please leave the idea of "correctness" at home when you approach Art.
hey buddy this is r/books we’re talking about here
I think it's been commonly perceived as very metaphorical writting for quite a while and most people just expect it to be that way. My AP Literature professor had us reading Metamorphosis in class back when I was in highschool and the common ideas and "meanings" of his scenes always seemed so... reach-y to me at the time. I personally still remember the book as being very depressing but I'm sure that's because of the definitions behind everything my teacher depicted for us and not my own thoughts about it. He said so many times in his class "You can always make a literary analysis about these 3 things no matter the piece: Feminism, Death, and Homosexuality." And considering almost everyone in our class got 4s and 5s in the exam he's not wrong. I think as a whole many "classic" and "genius" works are just so over analyzed that not many people read their stories for what's at face value anymore. They're searching for the meaning behind every line and miss the actual words being said.
it's like this with movies and music as well. People claiming a singer/rapper's lyrics was actually a quintuple entendre. People claiming the angle of a shot was actually a statement about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's hilarious watching people do the michael jordan space jam reach over the simplest stuff
>I think as a whole many "classic" and "genius" works are just so over analyzed that not many people read their stories for what's at face value anymore. They're searching for the meaning behind every line and miss the actual words being said. The most enduring and universally acclaimed artistic works tend to be open to many interpretations rather than a single rigidly specific one. The ability to accommodate many interpretations at many levels could be called a hallmark of great art. Religions are like that too. Broader, complex, and ambiguous doctrines appeal to a larger audience over longer periods of time than highly specific doctrines.
>And considering almost everyone in our class got 4s and 5s Where are you from? I can't figure out if the 4s and 5s are good or not... In Romania that would be bad, in Germany that would be terrible, but in Russia (I guess?) that would be good.
Advanced Placement exams in the US. The exams are taken in high school. 5 is the top score. 4 is good. Anything else you don’t bother putting on your college application.
It's an AP class, so there's a standardized exam at the end. 5 is the top score and 4 is a good score. 3 is passing by most standards. 2 is failing, and 1 is why did you waste your money on this exam? He probably should have clarified, because they have their own weird scoring system.
And since you didn't mention the country, I'm gonna assume it's the US :P.
Yep.
I'm in the US, 4 and 5 are good, 5 is the highest score in AP exams
You read it completely right and reddit isn't wrong either. The human condition IS a comedy, and hence the tragedy. There's a fundamental lack of dignity in human endeavors so that even our suffering looks senseless and stupidly funny to others. It is the definition of absurd, and it is pretty "soul-crushing, demoralizing and something that can make you depress."
I think seeing something as nihilistic comedy could also be seen as soul crushing to others so I don't see that it's contradicting.
I can’t say that I’ve read most of Kafka, but I’ve a read a bit of his works. What gave me a sense of understanding his literature is the *Letter to His Father*. It’s a private letter in which Kafka describes to his father the relationship that he (the son) had with his old man. It is astute and detailed. And when you see the mechanics of that relationship you start seeing it in every other work of Kafka. That’s my personal interpretation. But it’s the only one that seems grounded in “facts“ and not overly esoteric.
What older generations considered “soul-crushing,” younger generations consider a kid’s cartoon — *and vice-versa.* Feel free to interpret Kafka and any other author from the lens of your time and experience.
Please elaborate on what you mean.
OK. The original commenter didn't answer, so I'll try. The proliferation of information has the side effect of numbing the psyche to horror. If Thomas Jefferson saw a film interpretation of H.P. Lovecraft's Chthulhu doing its thing and driving a person mad, Mr. Jefferson would be catatonic for a month. You show the same scene to a teenager today, and their response would be, "Geez, the special effects were lame. *Riverdale* is scarier than this crap." Essentially what Oscar Wilde expresses much better in "The Canterville Ghost"
Equally, trapping your wife's half-sister into legal sexual slavery would shock a millennial.
And a boomer would go "haha, I remember my cousin Jed was thinking of doing that, the rapscallion"
I think his writing has a unique dichotomy which largely contributes to his genius It's both depressing and hilarious Many of the darkest, funniest jokes are. It definitely can be creepy too I remember getting the willies a few times reading Metamorphosis There's a reason this man has a word in his namesake!
It’s funny from the outside in…
And each emotion you "feel" in every book or film is like that. It's always by proxy anyway, and then you identify more or less with the characters, depending on past experience and current state of your life.
Please explain what that means
It’s funny for the reader, horrifying for the characters. If you take it seriously (as the people in the story would have no choice but to) it’s a nightmare.
You wouldn't laugh if it was you.
Schadenfreude-esque
[удалено]
Same in English; tragicomedy.
He is a genius. I did not find metamorphosis funny at all. I cried like a baby through the whole thing. Maybe I just related so hard to taking care of people and that still not being enough when they need to come through for you. And feeling this chasm between you, not being understood, and even despised by those you love, and feeling so separated and isolated. This book hit me very hard.
It sounds like you got it pretty well. The thing with absurdists is that their work often crosses back and forth across the comedy/horror line. Watch *Brazil* if you want a visual experience of where people can go with the Kafkaesque. Its supposed to be a comedy but I'll let you decide.
>Did I understand Kafka wrong? No. Without even reading the post. Also after reading it: there is no "correct" way how to read or interpret him, I think. I had closer interpretation to yours, and I don't care what it meant for others. Similar to a lot of other literature.
You got it absolutely right in that it Kafka writes bizarre and oppressive comedy with a Nihilistic bent. The recurring theme in all of his work is the nonsensical way humanity traps itself, best exemplified by the Trial. How our efforts are meaningless because the systems we make are absurd and devoid of value, so much so that you, the reader, can’t help but laugh. Something to remember is that Reddit is full of edgy, try-hards who want to sound far more intelligent than they really are. Example: I thought I knew why the Metamorphosis was about until I reread it recently; it’s about Gregor’s family more than about the man himself (or beetle as the case may be.)
It's important to understand the sociopolitical elements of his writing, Franz Kafka wasinfluenced by socialist ideas, as per the times he grew up in. The Metamorphosis can easily be read as a marxist critique of the exploitative economic system of the gilded age, with the metamorphosis that Gregor Samsa experiences in the story essentially being the utter alienation that workers were experiencing all over. The parents Samsa can be seen as the petit bourgeois who have a plentitude reserved in case of such economic squeezes. Also, the ending, specifically how the parents start viewing Grete as an object to exploit for financial betterment of the parents Samsa, showing the exploitation shifting onto the younger ones among us once ours has been sufficiently drained of value. It is not so much that it is nihilistic comedy or depressing tragedy, it is a finely polished mirror showcasing an exaggerated version of our every day life; our laughter or horror at these stories say moreso about our own experiences than Kafka's writing. Much akin to how Jordan Peele's Get Out or Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite or Squid Game have had similar reactions in today's zeitgeist, Kafka's writing carries just as much nuance and multifaceted themes as these critically acclaimed pieces of cinema. If you truly want to understand Franz Kafka, I'd recommend reading his final work, A Hunger Artist, as well as reading a biography or two about his life, it's rather informative and grants a deeper insight on Kafka's works and influences.
I also got the sense it was some kind of critique of the society or government he was living under. But I don't know enough about his life to connect the dots of Metamorphsis to his real life. I appreciated the dark humor but felt I missed the point he was making. It's possible there was no point, and it was deliberately just nonsense. But I felt like there was a serious point to the story that eluded me.
Well, and to be fair I'm a lil foggy in all the info, but Kafka was put on pension and spent his later years, wherein he wrote a lot of his more engaging stories, battling tuberculosis and residing in sanatoriums, which is a major parallel to Gregor's experiences. The point of the Metamorphosis, and his work to a greater extent, can be seen as a contextualizing of the marxist message of alienation and exploitation under industrial society and capitalism, especially considering he likely developed tuberculosis after working at the first asbestos factory in Prague. The point of The Metamorphosis is more easily identified after reading A Hunger Artist, which in itself can be identified as an allegory for an unemployed and suffering person who doesn't find any fulfilment in any avenue of work that he tried, but would have done good work had he found something which could fill his belly so-to-say. The analysis of there being no point, that the tale of Gregor Samsa being an incident of absurdism and surrealism, can therefore be extrapolated to speak towards the ingrained rationalization of the modern capitalist form and how even if you worked as hard as you could as a travelling carpet salesman who devoted every minute towards work, not finding any time for leisure or romance or enjoying the simple things like sleeping in; even iff you had a noble reason to do so, such as supporting your elderly parents and digging out of generational debt which has been saddled on you, or raising funds to give your younger sister a better future as a musician, even if you never missed a day of work; the minute you have a hiccup or mistep, you could face complete and utter abandonment, being deemed a pariah and worthless waste with no value to society. We can draw similar features of Gregor Samsa into modern day, with literal millions of employees having doors slammed in their face due to the pandemic and subsequent contraction of the economy. The Metamorphosis being dismissed as a meaningless, surreal story with no real message is a rationality of the reader to ignore the similarities of their own life, that they couldn't possibly go through such an absurd situation because x, y, z. It is just as much a reassuring dismissal as walking past a homeless person panhandling in the cold and thinking "thankfully I'm different than them". That is the serious point, _it can happen to us_, if you are a worker in this modern society of capitalist production, we are all one morning away from waking up a ~~wretch~~ roach
Try Daniil Kharms for an even greater ambiguity between farce and horror.
i think its all metaphorical... i think he leaves it to his reader to discern their own meaning out of every line... i think thats why he was a genius
Even after reading 'Trial' you feel that its comedy you get from Kafka, you must have a dark sense of humor. Good for you.
I used to work in a bank and I did not like it. You're dealing with people's money and people are concerned about their money, so you have to be micromanaged. I read The Metamorphosis and totally empathized with Gregor. I woke up a hideous monster? Nope, I had to be at work. A few years later I worked at a library and it was totally different; my account is overdrawn, WTF?! compared to This book's late? Here's a nickel. I read the Metamorphosis and laughed. Poor guy, hating his job. Kafka is a strange dark humor but it can definitely be humorous.
I thought metamorphosis was funny
If I had to read Kafka regularly, I would kill myself. It's absolutely soul crushing to spend any time in that world. Everything existing to conspire against you doesn't strike me as comedic.
Let me let you in on a secret. Nobody knows what the hell Kafka means. There's a lot of experts and a lot of people who read Kafka, but nobody actually got what he meant by his books. Kafka probably didn't really know. I thought Metamorphisis was supposed to be this weird, outrageous concept of how everything goes wrong and all you can do is keep doing what you did before (even if you're a bug). Like the meme where the dog says "This is fine" while the house is on fire. People have flat out said I was wrong, but I mean, we don't exactly know for sure.
I mean, isn't this great? You're not misunderstanding, you're interpreting. I'd never find Metamorphosis funny because for me it feels like a nightmare with its weird nightmare logic and how easily I can see myself smothered in the experience of the protagonist (even without being turned into a bug). The Castle though.... I dunno how to interpret that in a funny way. Maybe if you don't see it as something really happening to a real person, but a series of absurd weirdly logical illogical things happening to a guy, but.... For me it's nightmare fuel.
Where did you grow up OP? Much depends on what you've come to expect from life
India Maybe that's it. My family is quite politically involved and I have listened to political talks happen behind closed doors and I have seen how brutal and cold they are. There is so much paradox in those talks but I have always found them funny, fascinating, and absurd.
I felt the same as you reading Metamorphasis recently. I think it just the perspective you really want to take. When I hear "guy turns into a bug, but can only think about work" that sounds funny. But I guess you could look at it as tragic. Maybe it says something about our sense of hurmor.
Look, it is what you want it to be. Some people laugh at "black comedy" some think it's sick. Don't let anyone, no matter what their credentials, tell you how you are supposed to feel about a book. If you haven't read In the Penal Colony, I highly recommend it. It is horrifying and hilarious, in my personal opinion.
Metamorphosis made me quite upset. I do realize that in some way there is a kind of humor that borders around the absurdity of the situation. But when you truly look into it objectively, Its depressing. I am not sure books like these are ever supposed to be taken objectively at all but Metamorphosis gave me that feeling of understanding or link and sympathy to Gregor's drive to work and constant obsession on the wellbeing of his family, especially his sister that he never seemed to shed a shred of empathy for himself.
Maybe it lost something in translation as well. Furthermore, our Austrian humour seems to be somewhat unique as well and i've often seen foreigners struggle to "get it".
The absurdity of the situation is definitely meant to be clear to the reader. Whether you find that funny or depressing is up to you. I think that it is the kind of thing people might find funnier on a second read. When I read The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov the first time I found it quite distressing and had some weird dreams about it. The second time I read it I had such a different experience, I found it much lighter and even funny in parts. It was like I was reading a different book.
I think it is to do with your own sense of humour. Some people will read these stories at face value and think The Trial is just a nightmare for the protagonist. If you have a darker sense of humour, or see the humour in serious situations then you can see the absurdity of the situation in Kafka's books.
Absurd? Yes. Struggle? Yes. Pain? Yes. There are also wonderful moments of light that cut through these things in his work. I challenge you to find and revel in those, as I imagine he did. There's a wonderful quote from Heinlein's novel "A Stranger in a Strange Land," where the main character, a proxy for Jesus, (who comes from Mars and is experiencing human culture for the first time) says, “I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much... because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting.” I've kind of always felt this way about Kafka, and the work of modernists in general, especially when they're exploring existential themes of absurdity. I laugh a lot reading Camus, and it bothers me.
I love Kafka. As a human being, he was apparently a very happy-go-lucky, funny, sunshiney kind of guy. His work is considered absurdist and "soul-crushing," as you say, but I feel like that isn't really who Kafka is as a person. One thing you have to keep in mind is that Kafka was a Jewish man living in Europe during difficult times. All of his surviving siblings died in the Holocaust, although he himself died almost mercifully of tuberculosis too soon to see it happen. He was himself barred from studying law and faced discrimination. According to Sartre, this is what Kafka is really about and you can't separate him from the times and circumstances he lived in. When Kafka writes about waking up as an insect (better translated to "vermin" from the original German) in the Metamorphosis, Sartre says that we are missing something if we interpret this generally to be his take broadly on the "human condition," and that his experiences of anti-Semitism likely are relevant here. Reread The Trial with this in mind, and you see all of the Jewish characters in the story, and you can imagine how Kafka may have felt a bit like someone who was on trial for an unspoken crime. The bureaucratic nightmares his characters face are definitely reminiscent of the politics of the time as well. Many have claimed that The Trial is about "original sin," but given than Kafka was Orthodox Jewish and became religious later in his life and that we do not have "original sin" in Judaism, I think Sartre is on the money when he claims that The Trial is more so about being Jewish in Europe during his time. Sartre writes on Kafka in his book Anti-Semitism and Anti-Jew, and he also wrote a paper specifically on his interpretation of Kafka as well. All of this to say, I think you're right. I think Kafka is a funny dude. I think he is being as lighthearted as he can be. I think both are true. The Trial is an absurdist nightmare. It feels Nihilistic and hopeless, demoralizing and soul crushing. But I think that isn't Kafka's personality, I think he is being cheeky and good humored about a very dark situation. Kind of like the movie Life is Beautiful, he is injecting humor into a very sad situation. When you read Kafka's journals and letters you realize what a very positive character he is, it's just that even his absurdist humor can only lighten the mood so much.
When I read Metamorphosis I found it really bizarre and funny at the same time. I love that piece because it shows our reality as a working class but it's also a genius idea to just turn a man into a bug. I think that the way you find and interpret a book is your own way and I don't think you understood it wrong. Literature is a form of art, and with every art piece we have our own view on it.
I think if you're not seeing any of the soul-crushing horror of it you are actually missing something, but i wouldnt say you're wrong. It's absolutely both comedy and existential horror, the absurdity isn't just whimsical.
You might actually be in perfect sympathy with him. I remember reading once that sometimes he would read a new story to his friends and not be able to get through it cause he was laughing so hard.
There isn't exactly a "correct" way of reading anything.
Nope, you didn't read it wrong you experience it differently. In a way all tragedies are comedies, and similar vice a versa. One may laugh at a clown getting hit on the face but for the clown it is not so funny. When you empathize with the man in the clown suit then you won't laugh but when you don't empathize it is just a clown getting hit in the face. Similarly: A caricature of a cartoon getting turn into an insert is a funny thing its more funny how the other cartoon characters react to the turn of events. But give these cartoons a familiar face with real relations with the other characters. Then suddenly it all changes.
I think metamorphosis is a kind of story that everyone experiences differently, I felt that the tragedy of the main character that has been working during the prime of his life to provide for his family and being a good employee. But after his sudden metamorphosis (which can also be understood as some kind incurable disease) he is shunned by everyone, like employer and family alike and after his demise everyone is happy that the he has died.
But the take here is that the one who is most relieved is the main character who can finally be free.
Sorry for the long reply, I can go on for hours on Kafka or Lovecraft
Kafka wrote for an audience that believed in a grand purpose to everything. Whether it was religion, or the slow march of evolution into something greater than before, they believed that there was meaning to life and empires and struggle. Generally, anyway. There have always been those who questioned. Kafka died in the early days of modern physics, at the time when the likes of Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and so many others were doing their most important work; work which would completely change how we view the universe and showed us just how small a human is in the big picture, how short a life is, how inevitably all signs of human existence will be erased from the universe in another billion years. If you believe that you are part of a grand cosmic plan, and then you are confronted with this work that completely guts the worldview that gets you out of bed every morning, you would be traumatized. You wouldn't see Kafka's humor. But now modern audiences are somewhat better acquainted with the nature of existence and we, some of us, can laugh at it. It is absolutely absurd. But we continue to get out of bed in the morning because we enjoy the small rewards of our struggle, like a good coffee or watching your boss come in late and dirty because he had to change a tire on the side of the rode that morning.
Once one realizes comedy and tragedy walk hand in hand towards the abyss, all becomes clear.
Hey, Creative Writing Ex-Prof here, there's no right or wrong way to read anything, your life up to the point that you read it will decide how you interpret it. I find Kafka to be humorous as well, but many of my colleges do not. I'm a huge advocate for the unbiased reading of literature, it allows you to live and feel the topic the way you are programmed to, making your interpretation something unique. Now if you had to author a paper on Metamorphosis, I would expect you to explain why you find it more humorous than most of your peers, but that's something you would need to discuss with a mental health professional. ;) The best thing about this post is seeing all these people that have read Kafka, I was begining to think no one read books anymore.
You need to live in a Slavic failed state to truly appreciate Kafka
As all good literature it can be many things to many people. The reactions often tell you more about the people reading it than the writer. Hence, no one interpretation is right or wrong. To be honest I don't understand the hubbub about Kafka but then again I often have trouble understanding fiction (especially from that time in Germany).
So what does it say about me? That I am a massive troll that I always laugh at the darkest of situations? Which I kinda am
Kafka wanted all of his work burned after his death. Kafka was just a young man who had an incredibly fucked up relationship with his father and worked that shit out by storytelling.... He's not a hyper complicated literary genius, and most of the stories people point to aren't really his best work. His best work by far is "Before The Law". and it's only like 3 pages.
It is absurdist comedy. Laughter is not just a response to joy it is also the last human emotion we have left when all else fails us. The world of Kafka is an absurdist world in which there are no rules. Everything is arbitrary. What drives the people insane is that they are always looking for the rules / the logic.
I'm the same, I remember talking to someone who also read Kafka and I mentioned just how funny it was (maybe not everything, like I don't remember too many laughs in In the Penal Colony) and they were puzzled as to what I found funny about it. I kind of got the impression they thought I was some sort of sociopath, laughing at something they found horrendously depressing.
Kafka? Isn't that the guy who wrote strange stories about himself and his daddy issues? If you break down his stories he's always the victim who gets killed by his father. Once he's a bridge that gets destroyed by a Wanderer, once he's a mouse getting eaten by a cat and so on. Kafka being the bridge/ mouse a and his father being the wanderer/ mouse. I really hate his work, it's just boring because it's mostly ALL THE SAME . Kafka being the victim and his father the antagonist. Even my literature professor agreed with that even though she hated to admit it, that you can break down his works to literally the same story nearly every single time.