Reading the beginning of "Metamorphosis" by Kafka, the reader is confronted with a paradox, the transformation of the hero into a huge bug. This unexpected event remains until the end of the novel, a familial tragedy without seemingly to interest or influence the outside world, where everything keeps going on in normal rhythms. Franz Kafka skilfully integrates an unrealistic event into the real world as we know it. That is to say, Samsa is suddenly transformed into an insect while around him people continue to live and move with reasonable or expected behaviour. The hero, even into his new body, has human feelings and reactions: he sees, he hears, he understands, it is only his body that is no more human. Obviously, the story functions symbolically. Samsa, a sensitive and tired from the everyday routine young man, succumbs to the pressure of his environment and is transformed into a loathsome insect, …show more content…
The element of absurd stems from the fact that the hero’s consciousness; his values and his expectations, the perception in general that he has for the world comes in rupture with reality and this leads tragically to his isolation. The hero appears confused and unable to accept what seems palpable for others. Nevertheless he does not appears surprised but he faces the world as if he sees it for the first time, as if conceiving how this newfound reality functions, as if he discovers a well hidden secret or extensive conspiracy that he was unaware of. The absurd world in which Kafka’s herpes suffocate is a frontal conflict between subjectivity and objectivity and the convergence of the two levels creates the tragedy of the subject. Reality will cease to be absurd when it is accepted by the subject, when he submits to it, a fact that will lead him to absolute devastation and will mean his