Author(s): Shabir Ahmad Mir

Abstract: Franz Kafka’s au courant; “The Metamorphosis” recounts the preposterous and bizarre tale of the travelling salesman ‘GregorSamsa’ and his unanticipated transfiguration into a giant species of vermin. Kafka transforms the metaphor into a narrative with a minutely detailed bourgeois setting. The incongruous tale of GregorSamsa is embedded with multiple layers of significance and many layers have been peeled down till nowand brought before the world of literature by various scholars and amateur contemporary writers. On the veneer stratum, Kafka’s novella published in 1916, appears tobe just a tale of a travelling sales man who found himself transformed into an insect after he woke up one morning, but ruminating deeply overSamsa’s transfiguration with the two bigwigs of Marxism, Karl Marx and Engel’s economic theories, unveils an overreaching metaphor that judiciously provides the dubious story a great deal of pertinence to the structure of society. The paper however succinctly purports to explicate Franz Kafka’s novella in light of the Marxist approach.

Keywords: Metamorphosis, vermin, incongruous, Marxism, explicate, au courant, Franz Kafka, Karl Marx.

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.4.1.26