Food in Kafka's Metamorphosis
Food in Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis serves a narrative function and a symbolic function as well. After all, Gregor Samsa's family is seated down to an ordinary bourgeois breakfast at the time when Gregor is awakening from his uneasy dreams: this seems like ordinary narrative but it also establishes the centrality of food to bourgeois family life. To this extent, we should not be surprised that the succeeding portions of the novella use food to subject Gregor to sub-human positions, as the family gradually ceases to regard him as a member of its cohesive structure. I hope to show through close analysis of episodes in The Metamorphosis that deal with food that the overall symbolism is clear, and that Kafka's use of food in the fiction has a coherent purpose overall.
We have noted that the story begins at breakfast. One reason this setting is so effective for the story's opening is that we all can imagine the experience of having a giant insect turn up at the breakfast table: many translations, including Wylie's, describe Gregor in the opening sentence as a "vermin" and by definition vermin are not welcome in human domestic situations. A regular cockroach at the breakfast table is disgusting, but discovering a human-sized...
Symbolism in the Hairy Ape The Hairy Ape is an expressionist play by Eugene O'Neill and was produced and published in 1922. It is a symbolic work that deals with the themes of social alienation and search for identity in the presence of technological progress (Cardullo 258). The play speaks to the industrialization that was taking place during that era. In an expressionistic play, the number of characters is kept minimal
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