Gregor Samsa as the Existentialist Hero essays

Gregor Samsa as the Existentialist Hero essays When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin (The Metamorphosis, 3). So begins Franz Kafkas masterpiece, "The Metamorphosis," written in 1912. This work can be viewed as an exploration of the outcast in European society. It was written in German, rather than Czech, by a Jew in a chiefly Catholic country with an extensive history of anti-Semitism. Therefore, since Kafkas fiction is set in an alternate reality that is threatening, one always has the sense of an individual unfairly trapped in an absurd world, as he was. The weirdness of this transformation or change makes us evaluate Gregors role as the symbolic prototype of the Existential hero because the story was written from an existentialist viewpoint, proven by its emphasis on loneliness, isolation, and the autonomy of ones existence. Gregor lived in an absurd world full of suffering and peculiarity. After Gregor inexplicably woke up one morning as a monstrous vermin, he remarked that he saw no way of bringing peace and order into this mindless motion and that all his efforts to go about his daily routine were for naught (The Metamorphosis, 7). If Gregors predicament is taken to be symbolic of mankinds, then this effort indicates the fundamental struggle of each individual against the alien and hostile world. This fundamental realization that he was entirely helpless in the world came after his reconciliation with the fact that as for adopting another profession, he was not only too old for that but too fanatically devoted to fasting and led him into a deep depression, which led to his death. As the only human bug, Gregor was alone and alienated in his world. Even before his metamorphosis, Gregor was a traveling salesman who was constantly seeing new faces and could have no relati...