Premium Essay

Kafka's Dream

In:

Submitted By musicman5000
Words 1015
Pages 5
Marcus Bryant
English 1302
Spring 2012

Kafka’s Dream World
In his short story “The Metamorphosis,” Franz Kafka tells the story of Gregor Samsa, a traveling sales clerk whom one day awakens to find himself transformed into a giant insect. His state prevents him immediately from living the type of life he would otherwise have been leading, causing a series of reactions from himself and his family that would eventually lead to his demise. Not only is the this short story a precisely worded, tense modern fairy tale that shows Kafka’s imagination, but it also acts as a vessel of analysis of not only Kafka’s personal life, but how he felt about his life and the times that he lived in. In “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka creates a dreamlike parallel between the world he has created and his own reality, historically and symbolically, and uses this to criticize himself and the world around him.
Kafka connects the reality of his life to the fiction of his story to create a sense of reality in the dreamy feel created by the text of “The Metamorphosis.” Dr. Ianc Lulian writes about the many of the commonalities between Kafka and the character Samsa, especially around the time of Kafka’s life in which he wrote this particular story. (424) Kafka worked a job that he considered a waste of time, much like he describes the dead-end sales clerk position Samsa worked, according to Lulian. (424) Kafka works at the sacrifice of himself, much like Samsa, to provide for his family that he even lived in a similar configuration with as Samsa. (Lulian 424) While this is a definite correspondence, Kafka does not use the text as a word-for-word reconstruction of his life. Some describe this story as refusing interpretation, and being impossible to link directly to Kafka’s life any ways other than superficial ones. (Kuehn) This leaves the reader unable to wrap up any of the ideas involved

Similar Documents

Free Essay

Up Theme Paper

...movie “UP”. Perseverance is when troubles come your way you push past and keep moving through life. One example of this in UP is when Mr. Carl Fredrickson’s wife Ellie dies he keeps working towards his and Ellie’s dream of going to Paradise Falls. Another example of this is when Carl and Russell get to Paradise Falls and they have to walk Mr. Frederickson’s house around the cliffs of Paradise Falls to the falls. In the following paragraphs I will explain how Carl persevered and followed his dreams despite the troubles he faced along the way. When Mrs. Ellie Fredrickson dies Mr. Carl Fredrickson doesn’t give up his and Ellie’s dream of going to Paradise Falls. Carl knew that he would be sent to a retirement house soon and he was running out of time to go to Paradise Falls. On the day Carl is going to go to the Shady Oaks retirement house he comes up with an idea. Mr. Fredrickson ties thousands of balloons to his house and away he goes to Paradise Falls to follow his dreams. When Carl hears a knock on his door he opens it to find Russell, a young explorer scout looking to get his assisting the elderly badge, Carl know he has no other options but to let Russell come on the trip with him. Carl persevered through the loss of his wife and continued to follow his dreams. When Carl Fredrickson and Russell get to Paradise Falls they know that they have to walk the floating house around the cliffs to get it next to the falls. Carl knows that the trip will take a long time and the...

Words: 485 - Pages: 2

Free Essay

Type One

...Diabetic. My senior year started like it was going to be the best year of my life. I had planned out my future to one day reach my dreams. Varsity cheerleading was working its way to the top. I was so excited about all the things I had accomplished. But on August 22, 2013 my life changed forever. As I was diagnosed I realized I would be changing my lifestyle, adapting to all new things. I saw that my future was not going to be easy, at all. But with my family and friends I knew anything was possible. Beginning of senior year I was ready to conquer the world it seemed like. I was ready to go out and fight for all my dreams. I wanted to make them reality. As a varsity cheerleader I was planning on continuing what I love in college. I was planning on continuing on into college to eventually become a veterinarian. But on that day, the day I was diagnosed I realized everything would be put into a different view now. Everything I had planned now came with the question, “but what if…” Cheerleading is my one love and being diagnosed really impacted it for me. My first practice back was the hardest. I lost most of tumbling because my body grew weak. As the practices continue on though, I will work my hardest at all I do. It is my senior year and a dream of mine used to be to go on to cheer in college. As I look at it now though, it seems as if my dreams were taken from me. High school cheerleading is one thing, college is another. As a senior, working my hardest and being a role model...

Words: 741 - Pages: 3

Free Essay

Parkinsons

...medication. However Parkinson’s disease would be easier to control if it could be diagnosed earlier. By the time Parkinson’s disease is diagnosed, a person has already lost 80% of their dopamine neurons. In order to diagnose Parkinson’s disease earlier on doctors and patients need to see the sign and symptoms beforehand. Researchers have come upon the fact that an earlier way of diagnosing Parkinson’s disease might be through watching the patients sleeping patterns. Researchers are saying that REM sleep behavior disorder might share a common cause with Parkinson’s disease. REM sleep behavior disorder is a disorder in which there is rapid eye movement while a person is sleeping. It is a type of parasomnia in which vivid dreams are associated with the enactment of dreams. This disorder is a “dysfunction in REM sleep and the motor control circuitry in the pontomedullary structures” (2) which causes the loss of control over movement, especially of the eyes. Within this new discovery the REM sleep behavior disorder being associated with Parkinson’s disease, researchers gave two hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that the degeneration of certain region of the brain stem cause REM sleep behavior disorder and play a role in Parkinson’s and some of it’s symptoms like depression and anxiety. The second hypothesis is that REM sleep behavior disorder is an early form of Parkinson’s...

Words: 888 - Pages: 4

Premium Essay

Dreams

...Dreams can be fascinating, exciting, terrifying or just plain weird. Dreams have fascinated philosophers for thousands of years, but only recently have dreams been subjected to empirical research and concentrated scientific study. Chances are that you’ve often found yourself puzzling over the mysterious content of a dream, or perhaps you’ve wondered why you dream at all. Dreams can be mysterious, but understanding the meaning of our dreams can be downright baffling. The content of our dreams can shift suddenly, feature bizarre elements or frighten us with terrifying imagery. The fact that dreams can be so rich and compelling is what causes many to believe that there must be some meaning to our dreams. Why do we dream? Some researchers suggest that dreams serve no real purpose, while others believe that dreaming is essential to mental, emotional and physical well-being. Although there is not much agreement on why we dream there are some interesting theories around.
 
One possibility is that our minds are running us through the worst-case scenario during sleep. Disaster preparation you could say.
For example if a new mother was to dream of losing her baby she is rehearsing what it would feel like for that to actually happen. So our dreams are just fire drills? 

 Another possibility is that dreaming is actually aiding learning. Some researchers have found that performance on physical tasks is actually enhanced by dreaming about it. Whatever the reason for why...

Words: 1268 - Pages: 6

Free Essay

Daydreaming

...Daydreaming With each breath I drew I took flight into a new fantasy. I indulged myself in a realm where dragons flew, knights galloped on steeds, and princesses needed rescuing. The next second I was staring up at an all too familiar tiled ceiling, the fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Tilton, explaining how to divide and where to put the remainders. Another breath later and I was off shooting down an alien swarm that looked like division marks. I would be awakened from my dream-like state quite frequently to answer a question that I did not know had been asked. Day after day of this led my teachers to the conclusion that I was mentally handicapped. I’m not actually, just not where I'm suppose to be. What I've spent most of my waking life doing is called daydreaming. It didn’t occur to me until recently that I knew very little of daydreaming, and what I do know was that people often look down on daydreaming as laziness. And I could see why many people would think that. But what is daydreaming really? Is the daydream a place where fantasies are made real, or perhaps something more entwined with reality where problems begin to solve themselves? With purpose and poise I set off on my research journey ready to find out my answers and a hope to find some way to claim my daydreaming frenzy as my own. "A time when the mind wanders" was the textbook definition that I got from the Teen's Guide to Psychology in our library. It was a nice place to start before I dove into the interwebs to...

Words: 1404 - Pages: 6

Premium Essay

Dreams

...of today. Dream Dreams are something we all experience every night, whether we remember them or not. 1/3 of your life is spent sleeping, and in an average life time you would have spent about 5 years of it dreaming and in that time, you all will experience thousands of dreams. In the next five or so minutes I'm going to tell you the most I can about dreams.  . There are numerous theories about dreams, but whomever you are, where ever you live, you will dream. Whether it's a good dream or a nightmare is up to your mind, but there must be some reasoning behind dreams, right? Everyone may know the main idea of a dream, but few may know that the explanations behind dreams are far more intricate than it just being a simple random thought in your mind. Can you remember the last dream you had? Maybe you could fly or were falling down an endless dark tunnel. Perhaps you were awakened by a horrific dream in the middle of the night Sigmund Freud’s Theory 1 - Finding an unused room What it means: The rooms in a house represent different aspects of your character, so finding an unused room suggests that you’re discovering a talent that you were previously unaware of 2 - Out-of-control vehicle The vehicle represents your ability to make consistent progress toward a specific objective, so in waking life, you may feel that you don’t have enough control over your road to success. 3- Falling What it means: Feeling yourself falling in a dream indicates that...

Words: 606 - Pages: 3

Free Essay

Criminals and the American Dream

...Blinded Aristotle once said, “Poverty is the parent to revolution and crime”. Throughout time, poverty has always played its part in America’s history. For some people, they were never offered as many opportunities as the average person. This caused them to look at life in a much different way, because they had to fight for many things that a vast majority of people never had to fight for. For some of these people, being a criminal was the ultimate American Dream. It was not that they were bad people, but they knew that living the life of a felon would give them everything they had ever dreamt of. This gave these criminals the motivation to chase their dream, achieve their dream, and eventually be blinded by the dream itself. In America, there have always been classes among the people who live in it regardless of what time and age in history. When it comes to the American Dream, not everyone thinks of it in the same way. This is due to the fact that not everybody grows up in the same way at all. The life of an upper-class individual is commonly going to be much different than the life of a lower-class individual. This means that these people will usually have much different views on life. In the case of a lower-class individual, they usually grow up in a much more poor background. For the modern era, we could refer to this place as the “projects”. For people growing up in these areas, they will mostly likely always have it harder than others. In an essence, it is really clear...

Words: 1169 - Pages: 5

Free Essay

Wealth and Happiness

...1) Divide the stanzas: Stanzas 1-3 A request for making a mutual attempt at letting America live up to the dreams that were once dreamed about it – by the pioneers and in its Declaration of independence Stanza 4: An interlude – someone asking who the lyric speaker is Stanzas 5-7: An elaborate answer to the question above: The lyric speaker, the “I” is (a representative of) the black man, the Indian, the poor white man, the people Stanza 8: The same person as above, now described as the pioneer who left his home country because of a dream – but it remains a dream Stanzas 9-10: repetition of the request to make America what it was intended to be – a country for every man, including the lyric speaker (representative of the people) Stanza 11: The land must be redeemed by the people (we) and they (we) must “make America again) 2) The situation( who is telling us the poem, what is being told?: The poem is written by a person telling us about how he wants America to be as it used to be. How all us people should all be the same. How both the indian, the black man, and also the poor white man is innocent in this chancing of America. He says that he is all the persons in one. He is the poor white man searching for gold, he is the Indian disappearing in his own country and he is the black man being dragged to another country to serve white men. He even says that he is the man “who says grab the land, grab the gold, of owning everything for one’s own greed”. He is...

Words: 312 - Pages: 2

Premium Essay

Dreams

...Dreams Dreams have been objects of boundless fascination and mystery for humankind since the beginning of time. These nocturnal vivid images seem to arise from some source other than our ordinary conscious mind. They contain a mixture of elements from our own personal identity, which we recognize as familiar along with a quality of `others' in the dream images that carries a sense of the strange and eerie. The bizarre and nonsensical characters and plots in dreams point to deeper meanings and contain rational and insightful comments on our waking situations and emotional experiences. The ancients thought that dreams were messages from the gods. The cornerstone of Sigmund Freud's infamous psychoanalysis is the interpretation of dreams. Freud called dream-interpretation the via reggia, or the royal road to the unconscious, and it is his theory of dreams that has best stood the test of time over a period of more than seventy years (Many of Freud's other theories have been disputed in recent years). Freud reportedly admired Aristotle's assertion that dreaming is the activity of the mind during sleep (Fine, 1973). It was perhaps the use of the term activity that Freud most appreciated in this brief definition for, as his understanding of the dynamics of dreaming increased, so did the impression of ceaseless mental activity differing in quality from that of ordinary waking life (Fine, 1973). In fact, the quality of mental activity during sleep differed so radically from what we take...

Words: 2592 - Pages: 11

Premium Essay

Business and Fire

...a celebrity has fame and fortune but along on the other hand comes the negative aspects. Celebrities do have the status to motivate people, the money to look stunning, and the wealth to make change in the world. However, their lives are less then perfect, and this price of fame is shown through the stress, depression, substance abuse, rumors, continuos media scrutiny, and the inability to enjoy a normal, private life. Celebrity's lives show society that what... Most people dream of fame and fortune, at least when they are young.   When we are chil¬dren, the sky is the limit to our dreams.   We dream of becoming a famous athlete, a movie star, governor of our state, or maybe even President of the United States. There is nothing wrong with such dreams.   All of today’s superstars were once small children with big dreams, and some of to¬day’s children who are having such dreams will eventually have their dreams come true.    As we grow up and grow older, most of us begin to narrow down our range of dreams to things we feel are realistic for us, but we dare not underestimate our abilities or sell ourselves short. And whatever we ultimately become, we can aspire to be good at what we do.   Most people do not want to end up just being an ordinary or common person but, in a sense, that is what most of us are, and we can be proud of what and who we are no matter what our station in life.   I have always liked Lincoln’s quote about God loving the common man, because I believe that it...

Words: 522 - Pages: 3

Free Essay

Paper

...The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber really caught my attention. I enjoyed this story because I can relate to it very well. I also seem to day dream a lot and lose myself in my own thoughts about great fantasies. The imagination that Mitty showed in the story was amazing and very detailed, helping to paint an excellent image of what Mitty was thinking of. This story was also funny in the sense that he was always getting into trouble for letting his mind wonder off. His wife continuing to nag him about making sure he knew what was needed at the grocery store. It also shows that even though Mitty is supposed to act like an adult and live a life free of imagination he still drifts off into his wondrous day dreams on a regular basis, and people often criticize him about it. The emotion that best describes how I felt reading this story was joy. I was able to relate to the main character because of what we have in common. His ability to get lost in his mind and create other places and times with such detail is excellent. It helped me to see the joyous side in having a vivid imagination and the different types and degrees you can go into with day dreaming. “He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye” is some of the descriptions that I could relate to because seeing this made me remember my time with the Air Force and seeing all the officers in charge in their dress uniforms. I cannot recall...

Words: 362 - Pages: 2

Free Essay

Blahhh

...DREAMS Once you were a kid, have you ever thought Santa Claus was real? Haven’t u dreamed of someone you want to be when you grow up? But once you grow older it will all shutter. But indeed don’t be discouraged for some dreams have been achieved. Our dreams are like our goals, our futures! Without dreams our life will lead to no where and our imagination will be limited. First of all, what is a dream? Dreams are a series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, though they have been a topic of speculation and interest throughout recorded history. The scientific study of dreams is known as oneirology. There is another meaning of dream. It is something you want to achieve like a goal in the future. What have you dreamed of? Most people have dreamt of living in a mansion and everything you want there, without working hard. But that won’t be possible unless you are born rich. If you have a dream never give up and you’ll surely achieve it. It is best if you had a dream since you were a child and until now so then it will be easier to achieve since you are familiar with it. Everyone can achieve their dream if they believe in it and work hard for it. But it will all pay off when you reach your dream. Some people dream of their life as a nightmare. Because they are now slacking off. It is never too late to start working hard for your near future. ...

Words: 466 - Pages: 2

Free Essay

Climb Till Your Dream Comes True

...Climb ‘Til Your Dream Comes True As students many of us are here in pursuit of our dreams in life but some of us may give up when the going gets tough and the challenges seem impossible, but faith in our hearts is the fuel that will propel us through the challenges we face in life prior to realizing our dreams. According to Helen Steiner Rice a well-known poet, faith is a force that is greater than knowledge or power or skill and many defeats turn to triumph if you trust in God’s wisdom and will. On the journey towards our dreams the road may be tough and many of us will be faced with many tasks more than we can bear; challenges like working to support ourselves, raising children in addition to the course workloads may be very daunting and impossible and many may give up their dreams. But always remember the hills ahead are never as steep as they seem and with faith in our hearts and believe in ourselves we can climb until we reach our dreams. I remembered when my husband was preparing for pharmacy school he was a fulltime student, working for 12 hours a day, taking care of the household expenses, and he barely got 5 hours of sleep a day but despite the challenges he never gave up his dream of becoming a pharmacist. He was relentless in his pursuit of his dream through believe in himself and faith in God; and now he is a practicing pharmacist. As many of us are pursuing our dreams we may be confronted with many challenges, which may abort our dreams if we give up, but...

Words: 337 - Pages: 2

Free Essay

Date or Aguaintance Rape

...Questions on A Raisin in the Sun Answer any 8 questions, but make sure to answer #8 1. What does Mama’s plant represent, and how does the symbol evolve over the course of the play? Examine the end of the play. Why is Mama returning for her plant the last action we see on stage ?Mamas plant represents her faith in her dreams. That regardless of their living arrangements and life’s struggles, but never to give up on anything. She took care of it every day it was a representation of her dreams to always live in a bigger and better house with a yard. It showed how strong she was throughout everything life gave her. That’s why she took the new plant to the new house to show that never giving up and keeping your faith her strength in believing in dreams that they come true. Struggle but to maintain your dignity. Dreams do come true. 2. How does the description of the Younger’s’ apartment contribute to the mood of the play? The apartment sets the mood because it sets the surroundings and the environment . It is a small apt with one window it gives the feeling of being cramped and trapped. It lets you know there in the ghetto and are poverty stricken. 3. How does the idea of assimilation become important? The family shows in the hope to succeed regardless of any obstacles. The struggles with their identity as with being African Americans. Beneatha with her academics to be a doctor to heal, and as well as her conflicts with Everyone. ...

Words: 925 - Pages: 4

Free Essay

Make It Stop

...Dream Essay ENG 101 Make It Stop I know that I am awake! I just know I am. I felt myself sitting up in the bed, eyes wide open and my heart pounding harder than I have ever felt it before. But just as sure as I am that I am wake the images just keep coming, playing like a horror movie, only in slow motion. No matter what I try to do the movie kept playing. “Please stop, make it stop “I Remember crying. The horrific images continue to flash before me. I am reliving the entire attack. It was so real and vivid, almost as if I can not only see the assault but I can feel the punches as they are being rained down on my body. Why can I not wake up? I know what is coming next so why can’t make this stop? I was forced to watch everything that had been done to me. As if I was an outsider looking in, I watches as the attack started upstairs. I watched as what seemed to be 20 maybe 30 punches land on my head and body yet I know the worse was still yet to come. He continues to hit me over and over again. The scenes continue to play out before my eyes. We are downstairs now, hopefully now I won’t wake up the boys with my cries. The attack continues I can feel the blows all over my body. I try running away but I cannot escape him or the terrifying fear of what is coming next. The images continue until I feel his hand wrapped around my throat. I know it will all be over soon. I begin to pray just as I did that night “Lord please...

Words: 1022 - Pages: 5