Metamorphosis By Albert Camus: A Literary Analysis

There has always been something that a person does with the intent of causing an impact in the world, but in reality it has no existential meaning. This happens to many people everyday and they question it. They question everything about their life just to get an answer. Another thing that many people, like Albert Camus, ask is if there really is meaning to life in the world. In the novel, The Stranger by Albert Camus, a young man named Meursault does everything without a care in the world and gets in trouble by the law, while the short story “Metamorphosis,” by Franz Kafka, is about a man who has turned into a cockroach and has to live as an insect until his death at the end of the story. Currently, there is also a situation where the one

This is a permanent solution to something that can change later on in their life. Camus also believed that when someone took their own life away, they would be considered a coward (Simpson) inferring that taking one’s life away was only done when the person was considered weak. It also shows that physical suicide is an “easier” way of handling a problem and that many people who do this would avoid confronting the problem that they have and would rather take an easier way out. Similarly, philosophical suicide is a “religious solution of positing a transcendent world of solace and meaning beyond the Absurd” (Simpson). Albert Camus believes that there is no God and that God does not decide what happens to a person in their life. Religion is a man made idea and this usually helps many people solve their problems. People use this when they cannot confront or fix the problems in their life, and Camus believes that many people should accept what happens to them not because of God, but because of their fate. Camus believed that absurdism “... is an

The idea of absurdism can be seen in part one of the story, when Gregor Samsa has become an insect. This can be seen in the first line of the story when “Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect” (Kafka 90). This shows absurdism because Gregor does not seemed shocked with what has happened to him, and tries to live like a normal person. This also shows that being a bug to him is meaningless and he does not care. Absurdism is present here because he has turned into something useless and this becomes a challenge he must overcome. This is meaningless because whatever he does, he will always be a bug so there is no point in trying to do something. This shows that he deals with the absurd situation because he does not do anything to help himself. Another example in “Metamorphosis” would be when Gregor Samsa is seen thinking to himself and asks “What has happened to me” (Kafka 90). This shows absurdism because he is questioning what has happened to him and he is confused to see his new body. All of the stuff that he deals with in this chapter are obstacles that will end up proving meaningless. It seems as though he is seeking meaning to why this has happened to him, which is pointless. These thoughts make him accept his fate of becoming a cockroach because it's the only time he questions it and