There have been multiple periods of time in my life that I really enjoyed reading. One of them was from about 23 years of age and older, and the other was from the age of 5 until I was around 14 years old. IN the middle of that was a dark period where I definitely did NOT enjoy reading, I kind of loathed it and never read for pleasure.
Why was this? Well this was because the school system selects certain things that they consider important and they forced all of us to read things that, classics as they might be, were boring and academic to the mind of the person witnessing it, and I was one of those people that ended up buying the Cliff Notes of the books so that I didn't have to read it all
This defeated the purpose of reading in my mind because I don't feel like reading should be some sort of difficult and convoluted process filled with nuance, metaphor, and hidden meanings. I don't go into reading something to show off my IQ and figure out the literary treasure hunt, I read to get a hallucination in my head and experience a good story.
The Metamorphosis is a decent enough story and it is filled with a lot of strange things that are emotional and say a lot about human behavior. I suppose that is why the name Kafka is so famous even though a lot of people might not even be sure why.
The book itself is about a man that is a young adult working his way through life and trying to make something of himself but then one day he wakes up and he is an insect. A very large insect. He has to figure out hot to not terrify his family and work colleagues and they go through stages of his family at first being afraid of him and not knowing that he actually is the bug, then they accept it but are still fearful of him so he closes himself off in his bedroom. He has to navigate his employment and relationships with the people that he knows in a new way.
Or at least that is what I took away from it.
The story itself isn't very long, only about 60 pages of a standard sized paperback book with 12 point font. It is very readable in one sitting and is reasonably entertaining. I was content to just understand the struggle of waking up as an insect and trying to convince your family that you are still you and to not kill you, as well as attempt to continue to live even though you are now a bug.
The problem I had with it begins with the above picture and then carries on for an addition 120 pages. There are professors and smarty-pants people out there that seemed to break down this book to be some sort of lesson or parable rather than just a story about a man who wakes up as a bug.
The thing is, there is no way for anyone to confirm that any of this is the case, despite all the letters that come after their names on a business card because there wasn't a great deal of talk about the book while he was still alive. The book was published and received a rather "meh" response from the public and then he died 9 years later.
So all of these scholarly interpretations are simply opinions, learned as they may be.
I didn't stick around for the exhaustive breakdown of the story and got kind of annoyed about a lot of it. There was a 3 paragraph section where someone was interpreting "I am tired" where he attempted to suggest that Kafka wasn't talking about the bug-man being tired, but instead he mentioned Jesus dying on the cross instead. That seems like a bit of a stretch to me.
I guess I am not intellectual enough to really look at this story as anything other than a man waking up and having transformed into an insect, must try to navigate the world as he is. I'm not saying nobody else can read between the lines, I just didn't find it necessary to do so.
This is the reason why I didn't like reading in high school. We weren't allowed to just read a book and take it at its literal suggestions, we had to attempt to concern ourselves with the historical events that were taking place at the time, even if they weren't specifically mentioned. This "search for clues" took all the enjoyment out of reading for me and this is the reason why Cliff Notes sold 60 million copies of their cheat sheets of academic fiction.
I have since tried to return to many of the classics and have enjoyed quite a few of them solely because I didn't have some dusty professor telling me that I am wrong because I didn't see the hidden meaning in something like "Dandelion Wine" or basically anything by Shakespeare.
If you see this classic, I guess read it so you can say that you did. Or if you are the type that likes to find hidden treasure meanings in literature, this one apparently is absolutely loaded with it. It should be noted that Kafka wrote this in 3 weeks, and himself never considered it to be anything particularly extraordinary referring to writing it as "deeply unpleasant experience."
