One TikTok reads, "when he says "ily" but kafka said, "you are the knife I turn inside myself." Following the thread, another reads, "he's a ten but he hasn't read any of Kafka's books." Some are just plain surprised, tweeting "I hate how much I connect with Franz Kafka." TikTok has been quoting his deep and amorous lines, pondering over the fact that people these days don't wax lyrical like Kafka can. People are also pining over the way the author writes about love. His most prominent work is able to be read in a single sitting garnering a readership of people who (let's face it, have shorter attention spans) yet want to read classic works of fiction. The accessibility of Kafka's writing is a further reason for its widespread appeal. This tracks Gen Z who have been deemed the 'loneliest living generation.' Gregor is alone in his bedroom for most of the novella. We've seen this before with the likes of Donna Tart's The Secret History, as the novel delves into some deep philosophical meanderings and touches on similar themes to The Metamorphosis. Isolation from the world, and from others around you feature prominently in Tart's 1992 novel which runs through Kafka's work in a similar vein. The dark and cynical tone used in Kafka's The Metamorphosis hits at something specific with TikTok. Subsequently, he struggles to adjust to his new condition. A salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find that he's been inexplicably transformed into a huge insect. The story of The Metamorphosis, for those of us who haven't picked it up since English class, is as follows. Other traveling salesmen live like harem women.What happens in Kafka's The Metamorphosis? ‘This getting up early,’ he thought, ‘makes a man quite idiotic. He slid back again into his earlier position. But he retracted it immediately, for the contact felt like a cold shower all over him. He slowly pushed himself on his back closer to the bed post so that he could lift his head more easily, found the itchy part, which was entirely covered with small white spots (he did not know what to make of them), and wanted to feel the place with a leg. To hell with it all!’ He felt a slight itching on the top of his abdomen. The stresses of trade are much greater than the work going on at head office, and, in addition to that, I have to deal with the problems of traveling, the worries about train connections, irregular bad food, temporary and constantly changing human relationships which never come from the heart. ‘O God,’ he thought, ‘what a demanding job I’ve chosen! Day in, day out on the road. He must have tried it a hundred times, closing his eyes, so that he would not have to see the wriggling legs, and gave up only when he began to feel a light, dull pain in his side which he had never felt before. No matter how hard he threw himself onto his right side, he always rolled again onto his back. But this was entirely impractical, for he was used to sleeping on his right side, and in his present state he couldn’t get himself into this position. ‘Why don’t I keep sleeping for a little while longer and forget all this foolishness,’ he thought. The dreary weather (the rain drops were falling audibly down on the metal window ledge) made him quite melancholy. Gregor’s glance then turned to the window. She sat erect there, lifting up in the direction of the viewer a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm disappeared. It was a picture of a woman with a fur hat and a fur boa. Above the table, on which an unpacked collection of sample cloth goods was spread out (Samsa was a traveling salesman) hung the picture which he had cut out of an illustrated magazine a little while ago and set in a pretty gilt frame. His room, a proper room for a human being, only somewhat too small, lay quietly between the four well-known walls. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.
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