When I see the word Kafkaesque, my first guess is that it is something ‘of Kafka.’ I thought the word means his own works of literature maybe, or the style which he uses to write. From reading “The Metamorphosis,” the reader gets a sense of what style Franz Kafka uses, and one can say that is something different. It is not the plain literature we are used to, but something different and awkward. After searching the word Kafkaesque, I got that its meaning is “of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or resembling the literary work of Franz Kafka; marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity.”

When I read The Metamorphosis, my first reaction was that of disgust and fear at the same time. We are taken into this dream world, one can say, where Gregor has incarnated into a vermin, and now he is forced to live life like an animal, isolated from his family, who feel disgusted by his new appearance. “He was especially fond of hanging from the ceiling; it was quite different from lying on the floor; he could breathe more freely; his body had a light swing to it; and up there, relaxed and almost happy, it might happen that he would surprise even himself by letting go of the ceiling and landing on the floor with a crash…very soon his sister noticed his new way of entertaining himself- he had, after all, left traces of the adhesive from his feet as he crawled about.” Here we have a person who from nights’ sleep, went from being a perfect man to a creature. As the reader, one thinks that this only happens in dreams or nightmares better yet. Then we continue to read how he lives life as a horrible vermin, deprived from his human qualities for months.

From “The Metamorphosis,” we get to see how Franz Kafka uses a different literary style that is unique to his own writing, which is bizarre and grotesque, as what the word ‘Kafkaesque’ defines.