Please answer any two of the prompts in a single main post. You can do this by creating your own thread or responding to mine. Aim for a paragraph or two response to each. The main thing is engaging closely with the texts, their terms, and, possibly, how one text connects with another. After this first post, you can post another answer to another prompt or/and you can respond to the post of a classmate. It is up to you how you complete your next two posts.
1. Write a question or two of your own and answer it/them.
2. If you were to make a play/movie of this story, would Gregor be played as man or as bug (man in costume)? Why?
3. Kafka refused to allow a picture of a bug on the cover of his book. Why might this be?
4. Explain the inverse ratio of Gregor’s suffering and his family’s happiness. How does this explain the ending?
5. Explore the scene in which Gregor reacts to his sister playing the violin. What does this scene imply for the story’s position on beauty and art?
6. The word “metamorphosis” connotes a process or at least the moment of change, but Franz Kafka’s story does not portray that moment. Gregor simply wakes up as the bug. How would the story change if Kafka had shown the audience the process of transformation? Why didn’t he show the metamorphosis?
7. Doors are overdetermined in The Metamorphosis. Locate where they occur in the story. What is said about them again and again. Are they open? Closed? Locked? What do their condition tell us about the story?
8. Gregor’s mind still thinks as a human would (maybe?). How does this mind (not) compensate for its new enclosure? How does it see itself? How is it seen? Can this understanding be applied to the other people in the story? How do they see themselves? How are they seen?
9. What does Freire mean by ‘beings for others’ (3)? Are there ‘beings for others’ in The Metamorphosis?
10. Do words, as Freire states, have a transforming power? What does he mean by this? How do words change throughout The Metamorphosis? Is the same thing/person called something else later in the story? Significance?
11. Freire argues that “The interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them.” What does this mean? Can Gregor (or other characters) serve as examples of this? Again, look at authority and how it is displayed.
12. What does it mean to “Mythicize reality” (paragraph Once again, the two…) Can you find examples of this in The Metamorphosis? What about the story itself? What has Kafka done?